Difficulty: ★★★★☆
Some packages have a development version available from AUR, identifiable with the -git suffix. You can install those in place of the “standard version” package in order to have the latest development build available.
Attention! There are several things to take into account when using a development package version:
- Development packages usually do not change version with new commit from the developers. Instead, the version for that package very often simply refer to the build process version. This means those packages are not the updated the same way.
- When using CLI package managers, the
--devel option is usually to be used in order to detect changes to the source, and thus allows to rebuild the package using the latest version.
- In pamac, you may enable “Check for development packages updates” in the settings.
- Development version is even more bleeding-edge than what is usually in the repositories, as they use a development state before release. You are then very dependent to the developers’ quality in coding.
The developers would be grateful if you can then contribute, by signaling them any issue you find.
- Likewise, using a development version usually places you way ahead of the repositories in term of dependency alignment, which can also be source of instability.
For those reasons, using development versions is not recommended, moreso for core packages, unless you are confident with your debugging skills.