Just update AUR Packages (Feature)

[ask6155]

Hey!
I would be nice to have a flag to ignore repo packages entirely and just update AUR packages

I always do -Syyu to check for package updates but it doesn't show AUR packages.
I would like to update AUR packages more frequently that repo packages and actually see which AUR packages are there for an update.
Hence I would like an --aur-only flag to just check and update AUR packages

Thanking you

[polygamma]

The feature existed, but has been removed. One should not update AUR packages only, because it is kind of the same thing as a "partial upgrade" and those are unsupported

[AladW]

I'm not sure that logic is completely valid, since AUR packages are completely up to the user, whether you update them with repo packages or not. In any case, you can just use an archive.archlinux.org snapshot instead.

[polygamma]

But AUR packages may depend on "latest" versions of packages, upgrading the AUR packages only may lead to malfunctioning packages since the repo packages have not been updated, too.

All in all a edge case, but I do not feel like I wanna support this. Update everything or nothing

[Morganamilo]

But if that's the case then the versioned dependencies will handle that right? If it's not versioned and the AUR package does not have an update waiting then you'll end up with a .so name problem anyway.

[polygamma]

I do not mean versioned dependencies. Take a look at e.g. aurman which depends on expac. I do not feel like versioning the dependency, because well it's Arch, if you are using an outdated version of expac and the current aurman version that's your business but nothing you should do.

[polygamma]

It's also not even possible to update "only AUR packages" in many cases, since AUR packages may depend on repo packages and thus the update of an AUR package may require the update of a repo package, too. All about this is hacky and silly, I do not like it, hence no support

[Morganamilo]

The way I define --aur:

Targets and sysupgrade candidates will be only be searched for in the AUR. Dependency resolving will still act as normal and include repository packages.

So I would disagree on it being "hacky and silly".

It seems you've made up your mind though, just wanted to share. Do what you wanna do.

[polygamma]

But what do you do, when you've got an AUR package which needs to be updated, and the new version requires a newer version of a repo package, too. Partial upgrade?

[Morganamilo]

You can't really get a partial upgrade unless you do -Sy. So fetching this newer version should fail as it does not exist in the local databse.

[polygamma]

You are right, that should not happen. Anyway: I really dislike the idea of updating AUR packages only, feels wrong to me in every possible way

[eli-schwartz]

Building new AUR packages against an outdated local system may "technically work and be correct" since the resulting package will be compiled for the old system, but it's kind of asking for accidents to happen... it's backwards logic, because then when sonames update you need to immediately rebuild it again, and I don't really see the utility in making rebuilds more likely to be needed than they already are.

Saying "but oh, it's not a partial update since AUR packages are the wild west anyway and the repos themselves are consistent" is not a convincing argument to me.

If you really don't want to update your system from the repos, you should use a mildly sane method like archive.archlinux.org to pin your repositories anyway. It even has aliases to pin the repository state to a weekly or monthly snapshot.