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I wish Arch could learn some lessons from NixOS packaging. One thing that really bothers me about Arch is how many pain points there are in the packaging toolin
by hurricanepootis 7mo ago
I wish Arch could learn some lessons from NixOS packaging. One thing that really bothers me about Arch is how many pain points there are in the packaging tooling. Furthermore, I wish AUR packagers used utilities like namcap and chroot building to check their packages before pushing their slop onto the AUR; whenever I use new software from the AUR, I check the PKGBUILD to see how well it was made.
- k_g_b_ 7mo agoCompared to other Linux distribution's package tooling Arch's is pretty nice and painless, I think. Agreed with namcap/chroot - I think there should be even more mandatory checks on pushing stuff to AUR. But even so - regarding your last point: you absolutely need to check all PKGBUILDs from AUR or potentially get malware. https://bertptrs.nl/2026/01/30/how-to-review-an-aur-package.html https://bertptrs.nl/2026/01/30/how-to-review-an-aur-package.... is a nice recent article by one of the maintainers that follows up on last year's AUR malware. The final point sums it up, though: the AUR was built without the security mechanisms - technical and social - we want and need today.
- craftkiller 7mo agoBack when I used arch, I would use aurutils which has a flag for building the packages in a chroot. It won't prevent bad PKGBUILDs from being written, but at least they'll fail to build on your machine! aurutils was also nice since it creates a regular pacman repo, so you end up installing the final built packages the same way you install any other package.