MarsSeed [1] filed a deletion request for protobuf-static [2]: Has not been updated for more than a year now. I suggest to delete this package. Arch [extra] carries the current protobuf. There are only two AUR dependents specifically needing this: AUR/cntk and AUR/cntk-cuda, both of which are for Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit that was discontinued after 2019. Those packages don't need static libraries as far as I can tell; also they are broken since at least two years ago because they need Python 3.7 but have not been configured to use specifically that. Therefore I would say it's safe to delete this old package because it does not seem needed anymore. [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/MarsSeed/ [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/protobuf-static/