The developers themselves are often not the package maintainers. Before a package is published or updated in one of the official Arch repos, it has to be built, tested, and sometimes patched (which is why you see a -1, -2, etc. appended to the package version), in order to work correctly not just on its own but in an Arch system with Arch packages that it is likely to encounter. The process is not as thorough as Debian for example, but it’s still the responsibility of the package maintainer. If the package is still in early development, deprecated (e.g. wine32), an out-of-tree kernel module (e.g. xpadneo-dkms), or is meant to be built from the latest available commit (any number of *-git packages), the AUR is a convenient way to share PKGBUILD files rather than have the user build the software manually based on a readme, if it even includes build instructions. The PKGBUILD is then ingested by makepkg, which both configures the environment and builds the software, and outputs a package that can then be installed and managed by Pacman.
The caveat is that packages built from the AUR are not vetted by any package maintainers. They can have bugs, they might depend on outdated or no-longer-existent packages, or might contain malware.
it makes sense to me. remove as much friction from the publishing process as possible, so you get a huge amount of packages. this incident just shows they removed a little too much.
there are so many niche packages on the aur useful to so few people that nobody would go through the official process to properly package, test, and maintain them.
for example: vscodium is a fork of vscode, but microsoft disables the marketplace for it. the vscodium-marketplace package from the aur adds it anyway. i don’t think any regular repos have these kind of hacks and patches available.
I found it kinda funny that enabling the marketplace in VSCodium was your example here, given how much of a vector for malware that is itself. It’s malware all the way down.
You can download .vsix extensions from the marketplace and import them into VSCodium manually just FYI. And it won’t auto update so it will save you next time a supply chain attack inevitably hits and starts infecting new versions. Assuming the downloaded version isn’t infected in the first place of course.
It just seems odd to me if there is no maintenance why not just build a package yourself from the devs provided source code? Maybe I’m just an old man but it seems without the on going maintenance it would be about the same as for example using buildpackage and apt-build on Debian but that is a local repo for just me. So if something goes wrong it only affects me not the whole internet.
AUR is a repository for source packages (in Arch it’s called PKGBUILD) from users. You can write PKGBUILD yourself or just download it from AUR if someone already made it.
One of its biggest strengths is packing proprietary stuff that can’t be redistributed and using custom download clients.
You can share the PKGBUILD, but not the resulting package. Back in the early Humble Bundle days there were packages to install games from there with dependencies and everything; with a special downloader that could download the installers with a custom downloader and supplied credentials
There are plenty of packages that do this like game data packager. All then fixes i have heard to try to fix the aur is just reinventing main repo packaging again. I really do think what needs to be done is streamline packaging and becoming a maintainer. I say more apprenticeships to strengthen the maintainer pipeline.
I’m not going to lie the aur never made sense to me. If you are going to go to all that trouble why not just package it. Source packages are a thing.
The developers themselves are often not the package maintainers. Before a package is published or updated in one of the official Arch repos, it has to be built, tested, and sometimes patched (which is why you see a
-1,-2, etc. appended to the package version), in order to work correctly not just on its own but in an Arch system with Arch packages that it is likely to encounter. The process is not as thorough as Debian for example, but it’s still the responsibility of the package maintainer. If the package is still in early development, deprecated (e.g.wine32), an out-of-tree kernel module (e.g.xpadneo-dkms), or is meant to be built from the latest available commit (any number of*-gitpackages), the AUR is a convenient way to share PKGBUILD files rather than have the user build the software manually based on a readme, if it even includes build instructions. The PKGBUILD is then ingested bymakepkg, which both configures the environment and builds the software, and outputs a package that can then be installed and managed by Pacman.The caveat is that packages built from the AUR are not vetted by any package maintainers. They can have bugs, they might depend on outdated or no-longer-existent packages, or might contain malware.
it makes sense to me. remove as much friction from the publishing process as possible, so you get a huge amount of packages. this incident just shows they removed a little too much.
there are so many niche packages on the aur useful to so few people that nobody would go through the official process to properly package, test, and maintain them.
for example: vscodium is a fork of vscode, but microsoft disables the marketplace for it. the
vscodium-marketplacepackage from the aur adds it anyway. i don’t think any regular repos have these kind of hacks and patches available.I found it kinda funny that enabling the marketplace in VSCodium was your example here, given how much of a vector for malware that is itself. It’s malware all the way down.
You can download .vsix extensions from the marketplace and import them into VSCodium manually just FYI. And it won’t auto update so it will save you next time a supply chain attack inevitably hits and starts infecting new versions. Assuming the downloaded version isn’t infected in the first place of course.
i don’t even use it, it was just the first thing on my mind. lots of packages have multiple versions with niche patches.
It just seems odd to me if there is no maintenance why not just build a package yourself from the devs provided source code? Maybe I’m just an old man but it seems without the on going maintenance it would be about the same as for example using buildpackage and apt-build on Debian but that is a local repo for just me. So if something goes wrong it only affects me not the whole internet.
AUR is a repository for source packages (in Arch it’s called PKGBUILD) from users. You can write PKGBUILD yourself or just download it from AUR if someone already made it.
One of its biggest strengths is packing proprietary stuff that can’t be redistributed and using custom download clients.
You can share the PKGBUILD, but not the resulting package. Back in the early Humble Bundle days there were packages to install games from there with dependencies and everything; with a special downloader that could download the installers with a custom downloader and supplied credentials
There are plenty of packages that do this like game data packager. All then fixes i have heard to try to fix the aur is just reinventing main repo packaging again. I really do think what needs to be done is streamline packaging and becoming a maintainer. I say more apprenticeships to strengthen the maintainer pipeline.