Here’s the Deal

Aura vs aurutils

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When comparing Aura vs aurutils, 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 aurutils is ranked 12th. 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.

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Common Questions

What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?

Aura

aurutils

Pros

Pro
Written in Haskell

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.

Pro
Support for custom repositories

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.

Pro
Excellent split package and dependency support

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.