When comparing aurman vs Aura, the Slant community recommends Aura for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” Aura is ranked 4th while aurman is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Aura is:
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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Native pacman compliant
Pro Secure
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."
Pro Written in Haskell
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.
Pro Similar syntax to pacman
pacman -Ss ghc
aura -As ghc
Pro Run as Root, Build as a User
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.
Cons
Con Tends to break easily
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.
Con aura is difficult to use for system upgrade.
sudo aura -Syu
searches for .sig files for each repository.
.Sig files are not used with pacman