First, yay doesn’t wrap both of them, it’s just an AUR helper the same as paru is. It’s alternative software to paru. Each of them include pacman functionality but that’s not necessarily a good thing.
As laid out here in the pull request to remove paru from the iso installer:
any suggestions to use paru/yay for all operations(-Syu, -S) is dangerous to the system, and due to incorrect dependency resolution for non-AUR packages
Many cases of this sprung up during the recent AUR troubles when people were checking their systems for afflicted AUR packages and noticed AUR packages that they never installed(though they did), because they were using an AUR helper to do pacman’s job and wrongly installed AUR packages from the expanded dependency choices.
pacman operations should be done by pacman(or a wrapper for it, like Octopi).
cachy-update is also mostly safe because it compartmentalizes the operations. It calls upon pacman to do the initial system update, then after that’s done if it notices that AUR packages are installed it will then use an installed AUR helper to update those.
The danger is to newer users that rely on paru or yay to be “the best of both worlds”.
My usage of Octopi has definitely dropped over time but I’m not sure I’ll ever truly get rid of it. I couldn’t begin to count how many times I’ve used its better search functionality when I’m just perusing the repo, which I do surprisingly often(I may not distro hop but I like trying new software).
The thing is, you need to learn more terminal commands than ‘what you need’ because sometimes stuff goes wrong…
CachyOS puts you in Fish, so you get easy access to ‘man’ by just hitting tab, so it’s really quite simple… and tldr++ comes up with some pretty decent ‘common’ examples too.
The font, and the feedback is ultimately much more user-friendly than Shelly in my opinion - it’s just pandering to the mobile generation who can’t see beyond the glass.
paru does a really good job of separating the things.
I have yet to see it break this - unlike others (including yay).
The ‘problem’ arises when folks use it blindly for all of pacmans jobs and more .. and .. well, do not read.
Because the ‘issue’ of folks getting an AUR package from a dropped repo package because they just ran paru instead of something like I do, ex;
sudo pacman -Syu && paru -Sua
is not really an issue.
Its working as intended - pacman was run first and by itself.
Then paru undoubtedly even showed the whole darn PKGBUILD via a pager to the user, for each package, before they ever got a single AUR package.. I dont much like playing the blame game but examples like the above being painted as some sort of example of ‘the dangers of paru’ really is more of a decent candidate for responding with ‘user error’ .. even if I do think we have far too many random -bin packages.
I guess I fail to grasp what this might be?
As already outlined its not really possible that octopi is providing any more information than you could get otherwise.. so its probably a question of familiarity or possibly technique? I guess maybe some examples would be needed?
Perhaps I’m missing knowledge about an advanced search somewhere, but I can only get pacman -Ss or even a browser search on https://packages.cachyos.org/ to only ever “Search by Description” which, depending on the search, can display so many results that it nullifies the usefulness of the search.
I haven’t yet been able to duplicate the ease of repository searching that I get in Octopi. It’s the only thing I use it for anymore.
Thanks, but that was a brain fart from me earlier - I meant yay effectively wraps pacman + AUR (not paru).
I know paru is an alternative to yay - and has just been removed from CachyOS due to lack of maintenance.
So, my question should have been: is there a good reason to use pacman rather than yay given my use case of being comfortable with AUR for some things?
huh? I use paru everyday. Paru is created by one of the creators of yay. You should use paru if you use the AUR so you can see the PKGBUILD before you decide to install.
edit: maybe i should switch to yay. I see know you can view PKGBUILDS with yay
edit again. yeah scratch all that, i’m moving back to yay. It’s changed a lot in a year it seems
Ah, thanks… though I do see this as part of the ‘push’ to promote Shelly as the in-house tool.
Paru was long criticised for ‘lack of maintenance’ when really that just reflects less frequent updates… whilst yay gets a lot of commit activity, it also didn’t come up with so many shiny new releases.
paru hasn’t been maintained in almost a year. Lots of issues and PRs piled up - maybe there’s nothing important amongst them, maybe not.
Plus, when you get silly, defensive responses from devs like this one, it’s time to move on in my experience.
If you use AUR, yay is actively maintained and developed. LGTM.
Well, that’s nonsense - yay does not “inadvertently” install from AUR - unless you know of a catastrophic bug that no one else has noticed? Like most things Linux, you just need to pay attention to what you are doing.
I think this is an accusation that comes from a distribution first adopting an AUR package in it’s repositories, people install it, and when it’s removed - it’ll appear as an AUR install.
However, the fault isn’t the AUR here, it’s possibly the distribution (for not making a formal announcement) or the USER (for not checking why it was installed and figuring it out for themselves).
However, I’m a fan of yay, so no problem for me… this does rather sound like a few petty arguments shoring up certain decisions.
I guess time will tell whose right… but I like traditional update methods which I’ve adopted as a result of experience and forum discussions for at least a decade.
Feature-completeness is a real thing and if the software is in a good and secure state I’m fine with only security receiving any ongoing attention. Really only the “use the -git package, we can’t find time to make a release” is overtly troubling.
However the recent push for new security functions based on experiences with the AUR breach is spurring a lot of developments in other projects and changing the surrounding context. Prior to the recent spurt of activity yay hadn’t been in particularly active development either - and paru includes functions like building in chroot which are still WIP status in yay (there’s a PR)
We’ve clearly seen a ton of people who end up with AUR packages without knowing it recently. Splitting system updates and AUR updates into two different processes makes paying attention to this much more obvious. “Inadvertent” doesn’t necessarily imply “bug” - it can also just mean a workflow that requires more attention than necessary.
This is in no way restricted to packages adapted from AUR…plenty of packages that start out as Arch packages and end up being dropped (and moved into the AUR).
Having read through this and found that paru is effectively abandoned at this point I was looking for an alternative. Looking at the ArchLinux manual there are a few options.
While I know I can go back to yay as the proven AUR helper I was looking for something else just to try something different y’know?
Got my eyes on aura, does anyone have any experience with it or can recommend one?
Yes, package formats used by Arch haven’t really changed in many years. Thus paru can still do what it always did. Not having a release in six months doesn’t a broken or abandoned package make.
