[arch-general] Wrapper for yaourt and pacman

[Chirantan Ekbote]

Hi Ralf,

Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> writes:

> Thank you Gaetan, thank you William,
>
> currently I have to manage 62 AUR packages, so using pacman only doesn't
> provide what I need. I noticed that yaourt is a script, so I could take
> a look at it, learn and include what I need to a wrapper for pacman, but
> I don't like to do it that way.
>
> You seem to have reasons not to like yaourt that much. Is one of the
> other helpers listed at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers
> better?
>
> FWIW I want to have a cache for AUR packages, like there is for the
> official packages in /var/cache/pacman/pkg, linux-rt packages should be
> stored to another directory.
>

Take a look at SRCDEST, PKGDEST, and SRCPKGDEST in /etc/makepkg.conf.
If you want a different folder for specific packages, you can use an
environment variable to override the default. So you can do something
like this in the directory with the PKGBUILD:

    $ PKGDEST=~/aur/cache/linux-rt/ makepkg

> I want to install linux and linux-rt headers first, because I need VBox
> modules.
>

This is the only thing you might have to do manually or write a script
for.

> I want to add a history of what I've done when using pacman (and what
> I've done using something to manage AUR packages, e.g. yaourt).
>

makepkg has a build log flag (-L or --log) and you can set LOGDEST in
/etc/makepkg.conf.  When your package is installed it will show up in
pacman's logs because the only way to properly install it on your system
is to call pacman -U /path/to/your/package.
 
> That's all, perhaps an app already does provide this?
>
> Regards,
> Ralf

Best,
Chirantan