Responsible use of AUR

Oh, okay ─ I didn’t know that. But then again, I always update with pacman first, given that I do that from within the root account. :slight_smile:

While now then pamac got pretty fix against AUR excessive requests, why it is a bad idea of simply to turn on AUR support with checking for updates, so ordinary AUR usage as was before the issue?
I can’t understand it for a couple of hours.

I’m not sure whether the problem was fixed, but as I said earlier, I don’t use pamac ─ or at least, not the GUI version, because I do use the command-line version sometimes.

I checked the

[2021-10-16T19:12:47+0300] [ALPM] upgraded libpamac (11.1.0-1 -> 11.1.1-1)
[2021-10-16T19:12:48+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-cli (10.2.0-1 -> 10.2.2-1)
[2021-10-16T19:12:48+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-gtk (10.2.0-1 -> 10.2.2-1)
[2021-10-16T21:23:50+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-cli (10.2.2-1 -> 10.2.2-3)
[2021-10-16T21:23:50+0300] [ALPM] upgraded pamac-gtk (10.2.2-1 -> 10.2.2-3)

versions the with local firewall logs: it is perfectly fixed: absolute minimum of requests.

If you go to web-frontend AUR’s page (https://aur.archlinux.org/) and will search for example 5 packages, you will produce a ten times more (about 7x-8x) API requests than current pamac does.

Hope some authoritative person (for example Manjaro team member) will release the news about that users can back to usual use of AUR after they updated the pamac. I have no inside info about current ongoing experiments, plans and final line crossing event.

Is there a way to change the AUR update interval independent of Manjaro repository updates which look like every 6 hours as default. I don’t see anything in the pamac config file or the GUI?

Based on

your and mine review, it is currently absent.

I’m not at all sure about this. I would imagine we rank pretty high in the number of users, but we don’t have accurate numbers of even our own userbase, let alone other arch based distros.

I think there is a fair chance that there are more pure Arch than Manjaro users. But since we don’t have numbers, it is difficult to say.

I’m not really sure about that, for the same reason I believe there are more Ubuntu and Linux Mint users than pure Debian users. [1]

Manjaro is more suited to a general userbase, while distros like Arch and Debian are for more specific needs.

Manjaro consistently tops Arch Linux on DistroWatch’s rankings by a wide margin (I know, not particularly “scientific” but still an interesting observation.)

As someone who used to use Arch Linux in the past, and now fully migrated to Manjaro, I can confidently say I have no plans to switch back to Arch.


[1] “Users”, as in desktop users, not servers or sys admins. :wink:

To reduce requests from Pamac we have now removed auto-suggestions within libpamac 11.1.1 and AUR searches from global-search in Pamac 10.2.2-5. Users have now to go to the AUR category to get their search result. No changes were made to the CLI application pamac as this acts similar as any other AUR helper also.

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Is there a practical difference between
yay -Syu --aur
and
pamac update --aur
if executed from a console?
As far as I understood the latter should do something similar as the first. (except that it seems to include the regular repositories)

1 Like
pamac update --help
Upgrade your system

pamac upgrade,update [options]

options:
  --force-refresh       : force the refresh of the databases
  --enable-downgrade    : enable package downgrades
  --disable-downgrade   : disable package downgrades
  --download-only, -w   : download all packages but do not install/upgrade
                          anything
  --ignore <package(s)> : ignore a package upgrade, multiple packages can be
                          specified by separating them with a comma
  --overwrite <glob>    : overwrite conflicting files, multiple patterns can be
                          specified by separating them with a comma
  --no-confirm          : bypass any and all confirmation messages
  --aur, -a             : also upgrade packages installed from AUR
  --no-aur              : do not upgrade packages installed from AUR
  --devel               : also upgrade development packages (use with --aur)
  --no-devel            : do not upgrade development packages
  --builddir <dir>      : build directory (use with --aur), if no directory is
                          given the one specified in pamac.conf file is used
1 Like

Yes. See man yay and man pamac.

For yay, the --aur flag limits the query to the AUR. So syncing with -y does nothing. Instead, use yay -Su --aur or yay -Sua.

yay - AUR Helper written in go
==============================

EXTENDED PACMAN OPERATIONS
      -S,-Si,-Sl,-Ss,-Su,-Sc, -Qu
              These operations are extended to support both AUR and repo
              packages.

       -a,--aur
              Assume all targets are from the AUR. Additionally Actions such
              as sysupgrade will only act on AUR packages.

      -u, --upgrades
              Deprecated, use yay -Qu instead.

For pamac, it’s the opposite:

pamac - package manager utility
===============================

          --aur, -a
               also upgrade packages installed from AUR

I realized I phrased my question in a bad way. I’m sorry for that.

What I actually was wondering:
Aragorn meantioned that he first uses pacman to update Manjaro and then runs yay to update software from AUR.
If I understand the man pages of these three programs correctly, pamac update --aur does the same.

So is there something I miss and one or the other method is the “better” way to update my system?

(I usually run pamac update --aur sometimes after getting the notification in the tray, as the output there often gives some valuable feedback I would miss via the GUI)

pamac update will update everything including AUR packages if the AUR is enabled

pamac update --aur is actually redundant when the AUR is enabled, see above

Whereas:

yay (same as yay -Syu) will update everything including AUR packages

yay -Su --aur will only update AUR packages

:wink:

EDIT: Fixes and clarification

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That is true for yay (at least according to the man pages) but for pamac it extends the regular command to also search for AUR packages.
man pamac

   UPGRADE, UPDATE
       Upgrade your system

       pamac upgrade,update [options]
...
           --aur, -a
               also upgrade packages installed from AUR

I can also assure you, I just ran the command a few minutes ago and it updated my whole system. :sweat_smile:
Here are the first few lines of the output. It is in German as I didn’t plan to post it here, but I think it is still possible to see that it synchronizes the main repositories and suggests packages from there for an update:

~ >>> pamac update --aur                                                                                                                                                                  
Vorbereitung...
Synchronisiere Paketdatenbanken...
Aktualisierung von core.db...                                                                                                                                                              
Aktualisierung von extra.db...                                                                                                                                                             
Aktualisierung von community.db...                                                                                                                                                         
Aktualisierung von multilib.db...                                                                                                                                                          
Warnung: manjaro-hello: Lokale Version (0.6.7-2) ist neuer als extra (0.6.6-9)                                                                                                             
Abhängigkeiten werden aufgelöst...
Interne Konflikte werden überprüft...

Zu aktualisieren (184):
  libcap                              2.59-1             (2.58-1)             core       80,5 kB
  systemd-libs                        249.4-2            (249.4-1)            core       804,3 kB
  ca-certificates-mozilla             3.71-1             (3.70-1)             core       345,4 kB
  systemd                             249.4-2            (249.4-1)            core       9,0 MB
...
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I edited my post above. Sorry, was quickly answering on my phone while outside on a :smoking: break. Apparently I left my :brain: inside. :laughing:

Look at you reading the man page! :wink:

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You can register on AURweb and get email notifications for pkgbuilds updates, cloning the pkgbuild git repo, update the repo with ‘git pull’ and build with makepkg

5 Likes

That is actually a suboptimal solution, since now the category “All” is not really searching all the repositories, which is neither intuitive nor practial. The proposed solution of a confirmational pressing of Enter would have done much the same and would still have been intuitive for new users.

1 Like

To quote @guinux: Let's try if it satisfy everyone then I can think of proper way to add it in the code. For now we have to keep the AUR service alive. Sure it is a little hurdle to find AUR packages now, but the AUR is not recommended from our end anyway. Those who really want the AUR will find it now in the category. Be sure we will work closely together with Arch-Developers to bring back the convenience to our userbase.

8 Likes

AUR is not a repository - so phrasing is adequate.

The AUR have had way too much focus and way to many users may inadvertently have created issues for themselves by experimenting with AUR buildscripts.

To demote AUR to what it really is - an option - is a much better solution forward looking.

Now is the time to close this thread for further comments.

6 Likes