I hope this is the right forum. I installed EoS about 2 months ago. Long term Debian-based user so I’m new to pacman, AUR etc. The Arch forums very clearly say if I have EoS I shouldn’t post there, even though my question is about the Arch repo. VLC released a new version a few weeks ago (3.0.23) but the repo version is still 3.0.21 and has been flagged out of date for a couple months;
Is this just delay from the maintainer or is there a place that explains why it’s being held (ie breaking changes)? Is there a way to check with the maintainer on the status?
Arch has always frowned upon issues that are essentially motivated by “Hurry up and update the pkg!”. You simply need to be patient. The PMs will update the pkg when they are ready (and not before).
You can install vlc-git from the AUR if you want to be on the most recent vlc version at all times, it’s got quite a few upvotes(213) so a good reputation and the build has been recently updated.
Adding to this: you said you were on Debian, which will not see this difference until some time after April. So eventually Debian (and other static release distros) will have a similar number of packages.
Or they may do the suckless-tools approach where they bundle all plugins in one package, or maybe just the most essential ones.
PS: I both like and dislike Debian’s approach to such things because if I only want dmenu, I have to install suckless tools to get it, which comes with other packages. Useful if you want those packages. Bloat if you don’t.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can locally update the official packages yourself too, although VLC is perhaps one of the more complicated ones because of its plugin approach now.
On many packages, all it takes is updating the pkgver variable with the current version, updating the checksums and building:
updpkgsums
makepkg -fsri
f : Overwrite existing built package (useful if having to repeat this step multiple times). s : Installing missing dependencies with pacman (won’t install AUR dependencies). r : Remove installed make-dependencies after successful build. i : Install the package after successful build.
