8 years of Chaotic-AUR

Since 2018, a team of volunteers pre-builds AUR packages for you. Here is how we got here.

Timeline

  1. 2018

    1. PedroHLC starts Chaotic-AUR.

    2. infra 1.0 goes live with the first build scripts, repoctl and static pages.

  2. 2019

    1. The repository becomes an IPFS peer. The experiment ends six weeks later.

    2. The TkG kernels join the repository.

    3. Support for other architectures and Arch-based distributions arrives.

    4. BangL hosts the first community mirror.

    5. All packages switch to zstd compression.

  3. 2020

    1. The interfere repository starts to fix broken AUR packages.

    2. Chaotic-AUR starts to build the Garuda Linux packages.

    3. The toolbox (infra 2.0) starts. The packages repository opens for issues.

    4. “Last commit and the death of infra1.0”

    5. The lonewolf server is shut down after two years.

    6. Infra 3.0 brings routines, the keyring and the cleanup tools.

  4. 2021

    1. The UFSCar HPC cluster joins as a builder.

    2. The mirror router goes live on Heroku, together with the website at chaotic.cx.

    3. Mirrors start to sync with Syncthing.

    4. The router counts downloads in real time, with the country of each download.

    5. The Silky Network begins providing many new mirrors for Chaotic-AUR.

    6. Mirror health checks and geo routing send each user to a near, healthy mirror.

    7. The community celebrates the 3rd birthday with the first memorial.

    8. PedroHLC hands the main maintainer role to Nico.

  5. 2022

    1. A Docker setup makes it easy to host a mirror.

    2. An Ansible role bootstraps the primary node and the cluster nodes.

    3. The router supports more than one repository on the same mirror network.

    4. The first mirror map goes live.

  6. 2023

    1. A Cloudflare R2 CDN mirror joins the network.

    2. The pkgrel incrementer rebuilds Haskell packages when their dependencies change.

    3. Chaotic-Nyx brings the idea to NixOS.

  7. 2024

    1. Chaotic-AUR 4.0 moves the builds to GitLab CI.

    2. The toolbox gets its last commit.

    3. The mirror map and the deployment log arrive on the website.

    4. Work on this website starts.

    5. The community celebrates the 6th birthday with the second memorial.

    6. Download metrics, the repo manager for automatic rebuilds and the TypeScript router arrive.

    7. The router enters under attack mode after 500k requests. Traffic is back to normal the same day.

  8. 2025

    1. The website gets its second big rework.

    2. Active human review starts: major updates from AUR maintainers outside our trusted list get reviewed by a human before the merge.

  9. 2026

    1. Country mirrors redirect users to the closest mirror in their country. Other users reach a random mirror in that country that stays persistent.

    2. The router moves from Heroku to fly.io.

    3. High caution mode: the trusted list is switched off. From now on, every major AUR update gets reviewed by a human before the merge.

    4. Angular 22, AUR scans and failure tags arrive.

    5. GitHub Actions runners join as extra build nodes.

    6. Another UI rework of the website, including SSG and multi-language support, just in time for the 8th birthday.

Fun facts

Counted from the git history of our repositories.

chaotic@aur

Uptime
8 years, since 18 Oct 2018
Commits
30,169 in 18 repositories
Humans vs. bots
12,582 by humans, 17,587 by bots
Record year
2026, with 4,422 human commits so far
Busiest day
18 Jan 2025, 456 commits in one mass rebuild
Mirrors
55 in 26 countries
Night shift
417 commits between midnight and 6 AM, local time
Favorite day
Sunday, 932 commits
Christmas
21 commits on Christmas Day, every year since 2021
Biggest commit
61,226 changed lines, a reformat on Christmas Eve 2024
Longest streak
35 days in a row (xiota)
Top word
“drop”, 1,388 times
Cleanups
109 × “no longer needed”
Kernel parties
8 kernel releases brought to the party
Oops
22 commits
RIP
22 things declared dead
Reverts
75 commits
Typos
39 commits
Fix streak
5 × “fix” in a row
Shortest message
“g”
Emoji
only 4 in all human commits
CI bot
10,003 commits by Chaotic CI
PKGREL_BUMPS
795 × “Update PKGREL_BUMPS”
Hyprland portal
12 commits for one interfere

Birthday shell

Welcome to the Chaotic-AUR birthday shell. We turn 8 today!

Type help to see what you can do.

Thank you to every maintainer, mirror host, contributor and user. Here is to the next eight years!

View Memorial — 2024 EditionView Memorial — 2021 Edition