I have been experimenting with Manjaro for a couple of weeks. Yesterday, in response to my question on this forum, I learned that I could install a commercial program “Beyond Compare” from AUR. This was surprising to me as it is a commercial program and I did not think it was open source. That said, I also tried to install my favorite two panel file manager gnome-commander by the same process.
gnome-commander did not build because of a missing dependency on gnome-vfs (which is rather ancient and obsolete.) This was not entirely unexpected as gnome-commander will not install on RHEL/CentOS 8 nor on Ubuntu 20.04. If in fact it will not install on Manjaro…
Why is the latest version, 1.10.3 in AUR and how did it get there? I have asked the maintainer of gnome-commander if he put it there but I have not yet heard back.
If someone from the Manjaro community put it in AUR and has the magic formula to make it work - I would be grateful to learn how.
Just to demystify some things: packages in AUR are exactly that - Arch User Repositories, and anyone with an account there can create and submit a PKGBUILD of any software, as long it respects the guidelines will be there. The packager can or not be the actual developer of the software. Same with the maintenance part of the software and package can be different people …
Regardless if the packager is from Manjaro community or not, the “magic” can be done either by you, or later, as also some comments point out, that gnome-vfs should be included in PKGBUILD …
Thanks folks! I am not new to Linux but I am new to a package manager which will build packages for me. I think I will like it a lot as I learn more. I tried pamac search gnome-vfs and it did not find anything. I am building it now as I type. Done, let me try gnome-commander.
I have built gnome-commander on CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 18.04 and even created rpm and deb packages so I could install it to other machines on my LAN.
It appears that I am now building it on Manjaro
As to python2 [time out I am now running gnome-commander on Manjaro ] I was not even aware that it used python. I will communicate with the maintainer. It might not be too hard to upgrade to python3. I will rummage through the code and see what python stuff I can identify as python code.
Thank you all again VERY MUCH. Manjaro meets my main criteria 1) Mate desktop 2) 32 bit wine - to run FoxPro and as a bonus it will run Gnome-commander. As a rolling release I will not be faced with the task of rebuilding my machine every so often (Ubuntu 8,04 did not recognize my new hardware, installed 9.10, 10.04 did not recognize 2 monitors went to CentOS 6, that got long in the tooth went to CentOS 7 and over the next couple of years???)
I am motivated to learn more. And on that subject…
How do I find a package in AUR which pamac search will not locate? For example gnome-vfs.
Thanks cscs. I have used pacman to perform updates. I have also come across the gui pamac-manager.
I have been investigating the Beyond Compare “build” process. I found that the “source code” tarball is in fact provided by the vendor Scooter Software. However, it is not actually source code. It is a collection of executives and .so libraries. The same bits and pieces as would be in the .rpm or .deb file. My concern that someone had “leaked” the source code from a non open source program has been put to rest. On the other hand the source code for gnome-commander IS source code. I see it compiling during the build process. I have also found it in /var/tmp/pamac/aur-ken/gnome-comander-1.10.1. There is also a bunch of stuff in /var/tmp/pamac/aur-ken/local. I recognize many of the program names, a lot are part of Mate. I am not sure of the significance of these stubs. The only files in each one are desc, files and an mtree archive which I cannot extract.
gnome-commander was dropped to the AUR from the Arch community repo three years ago. The same happened with gnome-vfs which used to live in the Arch extra repo.
If you really want to find out exactly why, you’d have to dig through some Arch mailing list archives.
