[arch-general] best practices for rebuilding packages

[Sean Greenslade]

On Sun, Dec 06, 2015 at 06:52:58PM +0100, Michał Zegan wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> If I have a package build from aur that depends on a library, and the
> library is updated, and package from aur requires rebuild, is it possible to
> somehow track and automate that?
> In other cases maintaining such configurations may be the trouble as you
> have to remember what aur packages depend on your library.
> Another question: what about modifying aur/abs pkgbuilds, like I replace the
> whole configure line because I want to do so, but to do such a configuration
> for a new version of the package, I have to manually modify any new pkgbuild
> I get to get the same result. How to make it nicer?

I personally only have ~10-20 AUR packages installed, so keeping up with
them manually is not that difficult. My typical update process goes:

* pacman -Syu
* handle any .pacnew files
* mkinitcpio -P (if kernel has been updated)
* reboot (if kernel has been updated)
* check for AUR updates (cower -u)
* compile and install any AUR updates (if I feel like it)

Generally, I won't update all AUR packages. If a package is broken when
I go to use it, then I'll recompile.

So yeah, probably not the best strategy in the world, but it works well
for me. And as for modifying PKGBUILDs, you may try writing patches, but
it might end up being more work updating the patches than just doing the
mods by hand each time.

--Sean