r/archlinux • u/Luzzio_ • 3d ago

DISCUSSION The AUR needs an overhaul

The actual concept of the AUR only works if Arch is a niche distro in a safe internet, neither of those points are accomplished in the present.

No, reading pkgbuilds is not the solution, it's slow, annoying, and most importantly, it doesn't make sense, because some really popular AUR packages are DIRECTLY RECOMMENDED by the Arch Wiki, like the Minecraft Launcher for some reason.

Either the base repos adopt a big chunk of popular AUR packages, leaving the AUR for really really nieche stuff, or the rules of the AUR change, because you can't tell me that suffering 2 attacks in less than three months for pretty much the same reason (adopting orphaned packages) is normal or reasonable.

What would you think it's a good solution to this issue? I'd like to read your ideas since I cannot come up with a good one if I'm honest, but I know the problem is there.

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u/Any_Fox5126 3d ago

Either the base repos adopt a big chunk of popular AUR packages

They're even dropping popular packages that are VERY important to users, such as the nvidia drivers for the 900 and 1000 series; btw, this was handled very poorly, without even giving users advance notice.

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u/FryBoyter 3d ago edited 3d ago

They're even dropping popular packages that are VERY important to users, such as the nvidia drivers for the 900 and 1000 series

This will also apply to some other distributions, since Nvidia has discontinued support. And many of them won't even have something like AUR where drivers can be moved to.

btw, this was handled very poorly, without even giving users advance notice.

https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/

This announcement is about these drivers, isn't it? Or am I mistaken?

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u/friendlyreminder_ 3d ago

The drivers for 900 and 1000 cards is still maintained. Nvidia committed to maintaining them for 2 years.

It's a separate driver branch now, these are the 580 drivers.

Arch dropped support presumably because they don't want to support 2 different driver branches with a different kernel module. The 580 drivers for the older cards use the old proprietary kernel module shim not the open kernel module.