Both yay and yay-bin are in the AUR, the latter of which doesn't require any dependencies or compilation, making installation and updates quick and painless.
It is written in Perl in a functional-recurisive way, featuring full AUR dependencies support.
Being written in Perl (or any other language, except bash), it means that it can't execute/source (silently) the PKGBUILD to get information for a package, which guarantees an extra-level of security. Other benefits are the performance and power that comes with Perl.
Sometimes when building multiple unrelated packages, the failure of one means that none get installed. With this helper, it will not only ask you what to do during a failure, but you can skip the package all together without having to restart.
Some AUR packages require at times dozens of dependencies solely for the build process. Usually, once the build process is done, they stick around without purpose. This helper automatically removes those dependencies once all the builds are complete.
-Sy (to refresh package list first) and -Su (to install upgrades after user confirmed the package list or has been altered it via [M]anual package selection).
Since the application is written in Haskell, it means that, unless the author went out of their way to subvert the type system, at least some classes of bugs must have been eliminated for the project to even compile, and so at least some basic level of stability is guaranteed.
makepkg gets very upset if you try to build a package as root. That said, a built package can't be handed off to pacman and installed if you don't run as root. Other AUR helpers ignore this problem, but Aura does not. Even when run with sudo, packages are built with normal user privilages, then handed to pacman and installed as root.
Yaourt will ask you whether you want to alter the PKGBUILD before building a package. However it will do this once at a time, meaning that it will let the user modify the PKGBUILD, build the package, let the user modify the next PKGBUILD, build the next package etc.
This leads to the user being forced to constantly watch the yaourt command whether it requires input to proceed.
You may completely supress the option to view and alter the PKGBUILDs by passing --noconfirm to yaourt.
According to Archwiki: "does not source the PKGBUILD at all by default; or, alerts the user and offers the opportunity to inspect the PKGBUILD manually before it is sourced. Some helpers are known to source PKGBUILDs before the user can inspect them, allowing malicious code to be executed. Optional means that there is a command line flag or configuration option to prevent the automatic sourcing before viewing."
Due to a lot of Python dependencies, aurman tends to break after Python/libraries updates. Most of the time, the fix is as simple as reinstalling aurman.
Sometimes a user does not want to confirm everything she does, the --noconfirm and --noedit flags reduce the number of time the install/update is stopped for user input.
By default, packages are built and stored in a custom local repository, allowing packages to be installed, upgraded, and removed through pacman -S the same way official repository packages are.
Packages are built using tsort dependency ordering to ensure proper build order. The built packages are available in a custom repo and the user can easily install whichever parts of a split package they want.
Some other solutions are like using a chainsaw as a butterknife, yeah it goes through the butter, but then it also goes through your leg, and you really wish you would have just grabbed the stick of butter and smeared it on your bread with your hands.
Cower is the butterknife. It's easier than maintaining everything by hand but also forces you to pay attention (which you need to do anyway)
cower was never updated to take advantage of the multiinfo support introduced in https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17583 and therefore puts a heavy burden on the AUR server in addition to sometimes suffering timeouts. Users of cower are heavily encouraged to migrate to its successor, auracle (created by the cower developer as the next generation of cower).
Pacaur will ask the user once whether install/updating the desired package(s) is really intended and if so the user has the choice to review the PKGBUILD(s) and .install file(s). Once this is done there is no need for further user intervention.
Pacaur is a pacman wrapper which adds seamless support to the AUR. Pacman operations are extended to include the AUR without extra work for the user or additional flags to pass.
As pacaur is built on top of cower, it has the same very powerful search functionality.
Though since pulling the PKGBUILD and the install files from the AUR server is done by pacaur itself, it is still able to perform a small set of actions if cower fails. (This case is important on an pacman database update which requieres cower to be recompiled. Since pacaur is able to fetch and rebuild cower without using cower, it is quite easy to do so.)
Using the -r respectively --repo option pacaur does not fall back to the AUR. Vice versa the -a respectively --aur option limits pacaur' s actions to the AUR.
The program falls back to the AUR if the action could not be executed using the official repo. Therefore the user is made aware of the use of the AUR but is not hindered by it not being official.
Since the git repo of the AUR package is cloned with a depth of one it does not significantly increase the bandwidth use but has the advantage of being able to calculating the difference between different versions of the PKGBUILD.
Despite having mechanisms for ignoring .SRCINFO for VCS packages (or simply regenerating it once the user has trusted the build files), the developer claims this is a feature, not a bug, and that pacaur is, quote "Inciting maintainers to update" at the expense of users being unable to build the package at all.
You need some basic Linux abilities to follow the manual install instructions.
I'd like some constructive feedback and therefore you should be familiar enough with bash scripting to contribute back to the project.
It's currently the best of the "easy to use" AUR helpers.
Tested, developed over months with over 100 AUR packages of all variants.
Running aurt [no operation] in terminal provides menu of operations to remind you.
An aurt --help operation provides more details and examples using simple terminology.
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