The arch wiki page for the AUR has a big, vibrant red box in the intro section stating:
Warning
AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.
If you have ever installed something through the AUR in the intended way, you would know that it does not involve running the package manager tool until the very last step. You need to git checkout the package recipe, build it. This is clearly what the post you are answering to meant by “not part of the arch linux repositories”.
That’s cool and all, but why is that full disclaimer not present on the AUR part of the Arch website? Only a portion of it, which to me at least, makes limited sense.
You go to archlinux.org, you press on AUR, there’s no disclaimer about AUR packages not being thoroughly vetted, you find a package you need, and you do yay -S package.
To give Arch some credit - Arch wiki does state that “AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux.”, in a red warning at the top of the page. That’s precisely the kind of disclaimer that, in my opinion, should be posted on the AUR website. Nobody goes to the wiki if they don’t need it.
At the end of the day, this may be an argument over nothing, because even if Arch developers adopted my suggestions, I realize it wouldn’t noticeably affect anything.
It’s more about principles. The OS itself may be (or may have been) targeted towards technical users. But then more user-friendly tools were created, which the developers know perfectly well are used by almost all Arch users. Furthermore, they themselves adopt some of these tools, making the OS less for technical users, and more for average users.
Knowing full well the risks, they refrain from putting adequate warnings and disclaimers where people would actually see them. While they may not be at fault, this just looks a lot like corporations that technically aren’t guilty of anything, but are aware of issues and don’t even try to solve them, while actively increasing the risk of more people being affected.
I mean, genuinely, why aren’t the disclaimers from Arch wiki present on the Arch Linux website? What’s stopping the Arch team from putting them there?
I mean, you are right in this sense I guess. I see this topic from the POV of an arch user in the original sense: I installed the OS myself and made concious decisions about how I built up my OS, I by default read the wiki, I know why and how I do what in my system installation. From my POV it is obvious that there is no problem here. But maybe due to the rise of the user friendly arch-based OS-es (which is an oxymoron in my opinion) the current state of the OS should be reevaluated.
In the end, my opinion still is that if you use tools like yay, you are probably not the target audience, and maybe got lured into using arch due to the memes or stigma. Maybe the entry barrier should be lifted in the sense that for example the AUR and archinstall are split off the project into their separate own thing. Weird situation IMO…
The arch wiki page for the AUR has a big, vibrant red box in the intro section stating:
Warning AUR packages are user-produced content. These PKGBUILDs are completely unofficial and have not been thoroughly vetted. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.
If you have ever installed something through the AUR in the intended way, you would know that it does not involve running the package manager tool until the very last step. You need to git checkout the package recipe, build it. This is clearly what the post you are answering to meant by “not part of the arch linux repositories”.
That’s cool and all, but why is that full disclaimer not present on the AUR part of the Arch website? Only a portion of it, which to me at least, makes limited sense.
You go to archlinux.org, you press on AUR, there’s no disclaimer about AUR packages not being thoroughly vetted, you find a package you need, and you do yay -S package.
To give Arch some credit - Arch wiki does state that “AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux.”, in a red warning at the top of the page. That’s precisely the kind of disclaimer that, in my opinion, should be posted on the AUR website. Nobody goes to the wiki if they don’t need it.
At the end of the day, this may be an argument over nothing, because even if Arch developers adopted my suggestions, I realize it wouldn’t noticeably affect anything.
It’s more about principles. The OS itself may be (or may have been) targeted towards technical users. But then more user-friendly tools were created, which the developers know perfectly well are used by almost all Arch users. Furthermore, they themselves adopt some of these tools, making the OS less for technical users, and more for average users.
Knowing full well the risks, they refrain from putting adequate warnings and disclaimers where people would actually see them. While they may not be at fault, this just looks a lot like corporations that technically aren’t guilty of anything, but are aware of issues and don’t even try to solve them, while actively increasing the risk of more people being affected.
I mean, genuinely, why aren’t the disclaimers from Arch wiki present on the Arch Linux website? What’s stopping the Arch team from putting them there?
I mean, you are right in this sense I guess. I see this topic from the POV of an arch user in the original sense: I installed the OS myself and made concious decisions about how I built up my OS, I by default read the wiki, I know why and how I do what in my system installation. From my POV it is obvious that there is no problem here. But maybe due to the rise of the user friendly arch-based OS-es (which is an oxymoron in my opinion) the current state of the OS should be reevaluated.
In the end, my opinion still is that if you use tools like yay, you are probably not the target audience, and maybe got lured into using arch due to the memes or stigma. Maybe the entry barrier should be lifted in the sense that for example the AUR and archinstall are split off the project into their separate own thing. Weird situation IMO…