General Availablity [AUR]
With the countless issues with custom packages and the immense popularity of Pamac You all know I have been giving the general availability of AUR a lot of thought lately and I have aired several topics to draw attention to the unsupported nature of building custom packages using AUR as well as guidance - what to look out for e.g. the sometimes necessary dkms driver package(s).
The easy inclusion of custom packages on stable branch creates a vaccum where build scripts may rely on a general availablility of other packages e.g. glibc v2.35.
Like the use of downgrade is disabled on stable branch it would be possible to disable Pamac access to AUR on stable branch.
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Downgrading_packages
Using the example from downgrade one could set an environment variable to enable a build command to run.
ALLOW_BUILD_AUR=1 pamac build pkg-name
I don't know if this should be extended to testing as well as testing and unstable are usually very close to eachother.
I noted a comment from Mark @yochananmarqos1 with a very sane advise in https://forum.manjaro.org/t/qbitttorrent-4-4-0-2-segmentation-fault/103835/2
If you’re going to use third-party Arch repos like Chaotic-AUR, you need to use the Manjaro unstable branch to be up to date with Arch stable.
- Third party repos are neither supported by Arch nor Manjaro
- Downgrading packages is not supported
This brings me to the second part of my idea.
To increase the stability of stable branch Paamc could disable general availability of AUR in Pamac when the system is using stable branch.
This may also help to mitigate issues like this where it looks like Pamac favors AUR scripts over repo packages.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/updates-pending-in-pamac/103784/12
To sum it up
- Disable general availability of AUR
- Add an environment variable ALLOW_BUILD_AUR to allow command line build on stable branch