Yay, pacman, and installing calibre

General system Pacman
1

I’ve been using various versions of linux for a long time, and due to having various computers lain about with linux - most of 'em EndeavourOS these days - I’m not overly careful with the command line.

My default method of updating is to use the Welcome app’s buttons. But when I drop to the command line to install something, which is fairly often as I kinda dig using the command line, I use the simple “yay [name of app]” command.

Until tonight. I wanted to install calibre. But man, after an interminable grinding and chewing of memory (on this little 11" MacBook Air 2015), it tossed a pile of errors and aborted the install. Kept telling me I needed to manually install this file, then when I tried that, it suggested another file and tossed more errors and…

I decided to try instead of “yay calibre” to roll with “pacman -Suy calibre.” And dang it, the thing finished in about five seconds. I thought it had crashed again. But nope. There was calibre, runs fine.

So… what I do not know about Arch Linux command lines just might fill the Library of Congress. But I’m having fun.

2

Might you have been trying to install a non-precompiled (and bleeding edge) version, such as calibre-git from the AUR? It’s not unusual that a -git version would grind and chew.

1 Like
3

Good question. I did try the git file, but only after the standard calibre failied to install. It also failed, of course.

5

The other thing to note, would be making sure the system is fully updated before installing new applications. This will help avoid weird dependency version issues.

Something like:

eos-update --yay

or

yay

And as it’s been an issue of late in some cases, just making sure there aren’t any stray orphan packages hanging around causing conflicts:

yay -Yc
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6

The -git packages from AUR build from the source code and sometimes take very long time to build for big programs. They can also be from the very latest commits that is not yet tested sometimes.

When you use yay, look at the source of the software. If they are from official repos. Or if they are from AUR. When they are from AUR, look at the suffix to know what variant you are installing.

7

Is there some other way to identify a package which will install from git apart from looking for the presence of the suffix -git in the package name?

8

if you need to know the dependencies of a program you can do a few things
from command line using either pacman or yay use the -Si option
yay -Si $PACKAGENAME

You can also just go to the Arch site and look the program up if you want something more graphical try something like pacseek (TUI)

9

For open-source software, if you’re after the pre-compiled binary version, you want the -bin version.

10

I think you can always check the PKGBUILD to know where and what is the source of the software.

I took this screenshot from this post with good explanation

769×348 53.4 KB

11

thanks @cactux and @Bink

Thanks @thefrog

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12

Do you mean you want to know if the package will be built from source?

The only way to know that is to read the PKGBUILD.

13

Yes @dalto I wanted to know if the package will be built from source or will binaries will be downloaded and installed directly from the repo.

14

You would need to read the PKGBUILD and see what it is actually doing.

If it is built from source, you will see the build commands in the PKGBUILD. If it is a binary, it will be unpacking and copying files but not building anything.

However, the vast majority of binany packages end in -bin so if it doesn’t end in that, it will probably be built from source.