Building AUR packages for you, so you don't have to.

Chaotic-AUR turns 8 years old today! 🎉

Today, we celebrate another year of Chaotic-AUR, and it is greater than ever. Today, another iteration of our web presence went live, along with a dedicated birthday event page featuring data which was compiled from a variety of our git repositories and news channel.

I'm personally quite happy that we are able to provide AUR packages to everyone securely and in a controlled way, which the most recent AUR malware incidents have proven to be necessary. The times of unsupervised building of packages are gone. Experience has shown that package update reviews are, in fact, very manageable, also due to the fact that our setup makes this really easy and accessible on one single page instead of having to navigate around numerous pull requests.

The long-standing problem of having to find out about packages that need a rebuild via a bug report is also mostly solved these days: while there are still occasional things to fine-tune, the repository is generally able to automatically find and self-heal a lot of packages without having to explicitly declare a rebuild trigger.

Thanks to everyone who was part of the journey, and to many more years! 🤗

I'm happy to announce big updates to our website! Besides having received major updates in how things look, they are also a lot more interactive and useful than before 😀

- Build status now shows estimations for how long a build is going to take or when a build is assumed to start based on average build times.
- Build logs can be viewed live right in the website itself, searched, downloaded and shared. The same goes for pipeline logs!
- The entire history (which is ~2 years since we started using a database for these purposes) of deployment logs, as well as statistics and packages can be queried in many more ways than before.
- Update reviews became better than ever before due to better highlighting and some automated scans raising awareness for general things to be looked out for. I'm planning to expand this even further in the future.
- Most of the maintenance tasks can generally now be done from within the website, via GitLab SSO, which is also a great help. No more fiddling around with GitLabs web interface while on the run!

Besides our schedule pipeline, which does most of the heavy in regard of updating our PKGBUILDs from various sources, and opening MRs for us to review received some parallelization which allows it to finish in <5 minutes instead of 20-30 🚀

As a friendly reminder, please consider regularly auditing packages installed from AUR. The recent events show that being cautious is always a good idea. See also Pacman/Tips_and_tricks on ArchWiki. Here are some useful commands:

pacman -Qqm # list non-repo packages
pacman -Qqe # list explicitly installed packages
pacman -Qdt # list orphaned depends

Package updates will be paused for a while as pushing to AUR is currently disabled.

Stay safe, everyone!