[aur-general] AUR package q -- newbie

[Chris Billington]

On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 10:09 AM Raj Kombiyil via aur-general <
aur-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> Dear all,
> Greetings!
> Just finished my maiden install of arch-linux on my laptop, with my share
> of headache. But things are running alright now, I guess. It's kind of
> difficult to find packages in one place -- e.g.; I could install gedit
> easily (via pacman), but couldn't find the LaTeX plugin. Searching, I see
> it is in AUR:
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gedit-latex
> I see that in the comments section, there's some issue. The package is
> updated in 2017 last. I know all these will be voluntary work and maybe
> people don't need this plugin much. For me, I could compile LaTeX source on
> the fly, using gedit with this plugin. What should I do to install this
> package?
> I was hoping just to install and move on with my work. I am into science
> computing and don't have the knowledge base to make this work/make packages
> etc. I read good things about Arch, so I picked it. Apologies, I am
> thankful for the great work all the developers/volunteers do, but at this
> moment I just would like something that works.
> Thank you for your time and any help would be greatly appreciated.
> Raj
>

It looks like that AUR package is up to date, but that the latest release
of the project does not work properly on newer versions of Gedit. But good
news, it looks like the plugin is working on a new release at the moment:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gedit-latex/-/commit/0c8a2b949739024844dd8c26a0dd3cd02f471fba


So hopefully there will be a release that fixes the bugs soon. Once there
is an official release, you can flag the AUR package as out of date, and
hopefully the packager will have the time and interest to update the AUR
package to the new version. However, it looks like the project has changed
their build system, so the AUR packager will have to do more than just bump
the version number.

If you want to learn about it in the meantime, Arch Linux packaging is not
as complicated as it might seem from the outside. You can look at the
PKGBUILDs from AUR packages as examples, and read about packaging on the
wiki here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Creating_packages

If you comment on the AUR page saying that a new release of the plugin is
in development, I'm sure other users would be interested to know, and
perhaps other users of the package may have the time and motivation to help
package the new release, or discuss what might be involved.

-Chris