What's so special about it? Isn't it just a repository? Or am I missing something? If it's just a repo, Ubuntu has PPAs and everyone and their mother is creating PPAs.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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It's a single, central, community space for build plans, which are extremely easy for anyone to create and submit.
Edit: And easier to audit than prebuilt packages
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It really just comes down to the differences in goals and philosophies between each distribution. Some distros have large curated repositories containing most of everything a normal user would want to use. That's what people expect from those distros, and people use them because they want that experience. Likewise, people don't use arch just because it has the AUR. They want a more DIY experience, and arch provides that, with the AUR being an essential part of how it works.
You're not going to get arch users to switch to ubuntu or whatever by duct-taping an AUR clone onto it. Furthermore, I believe trying to make one distro "to rule them all" that attempts to appeal to every niche would be not only a train wreck technically, but an abomination, antithetical to the principles of the OSS community as well.
@InternetPirate I mean apt based distros do have ppa’s although I have found aur to have better support. theoretically though they are equivalent i believe?
Brew on Linux?
What does the AUR get you that a:
../configure --prefix=(pwd)/install make make install
doesn't?
It gives you a lot of convenience, auto updates, and dependencies. While it is nice being up to date by checking the git and making it by yourself it is much more convenient to have a package manager for it when you have many Make packages
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The AUR is nice and all, but the reality is that most people will be served just fine (if not better) by the more curated repositories. Fedora's bundled repositories are more than enough for my dev work - and thanks to Flatpak and AppImage, closing any gaps is pretty easy.