Aur like alternative in solus

Gold3nF3nix

Hello, I wanted to ask if solus has AUR like package repository or simply building packages from a file, like PKGBUILDs, for community packages and the ones unavailable in official repos? 🙂

brent

Gold3nF3nix Hello, I wanted to ask if solus has AUR like package repository or simply building packages from a file, like PKGBUILDs, for community packages and the ones unavailable in official repos? 🙂

no. but it's in future plans (I think). flatpak til then.

diagnostics0

Over at AerynOS it looks like things are shaping up nicely to easily be able to package something using their .stone format. Somewhere down the line Solus plans to transition to this tooling (I hope!).

TraceyC

Having a Solus User Repository (SUR) is something that's been asked about a few times over the years. It's something we're considering.

This requires Aerynos tooling to be ready and stable for 3rd party use. As of right now, this is still at least months in the future. At that time, Solus Staff will discuss it and come to an agreement. We'll communicate what we decide at that point.

The history:
When Josh was a core maintainer (before focusing on Budgie development) he posted in April, 2023 that we would. As I said, people have asked for this. In the meantime, a lot has changed.

Snaps and flatpaks have gotten better over time. A lot of work has been done to make packaging for Solus easier. Quite a few people have started maintaining packages, allowing us to support a greater number of packages.

There would be tradeoffs to a SUR.

Pros:

Multiple people have asked for it.
It would allow individuals to host a private or public repo that's available outside of their local machine. It would allow them to package software that may be too niche for the official repo.

Cons:

Software in a SUR would not be vetted. It may not be tested and might be unstable. It may not be safe. (All the caveats about the AUR would apply here).
Solus would get bug reports and support requests on the forums for software that we don't provide (like we sometimes do for flatpaks). This would add to our maintenance burden just from having to redirect people.

I hope that provides some useful insight.