4.0.0

Aura is a package manager for Arch Linux.

Aura 4 represents a signicant body of work to port Aura from Haskell to Rust. The motivations for this rewrite are discussed here. Overall, Aura is now much more performant and has a 4x smaller binary.

The main aura package, not aura-bin, is now the recommended means of installation.

It is no longer necessary to run aura with sudo. Aura is now internally aware of when sudo is necessary and will prompt you as needed.

Aura's configuration format has also changed and it is much more customisable in general. You can generate a new config file via:

aura conf --gen > ~/.config/aura/config.toml

Aura now builds as the local user in a local directory, which solves prior woes involving environment variables and the sudo-barrier. However, aura -A can now also be invoked by the root user, in which case just the actual invocation of makepkg will be done as the nobody user. This allows Aura to be more easily used on remote servers and within Docker containers.

For existing users, further details involving the transition from v3 to v4 are available in the Migration Guide.

Added

• -A:
  • -o to open a foreign package's AUR page.
  • -v to look up packages by "provides" (package identities).
  • --shellcheck to scan PKGBUILDs before building.
  • --limit and --reverse as additional filters on -As.
  • Support for building in a chroot via pkgctl build if enabled in config.
• -C:
  • -l to print the contents of the package cache. Useful to pipe to other shell commands.
  • -i to display data of a package's cache entries.
  • -m to display all installed packages that are missing tarballs in the cache.
  • -n to delete tarballs of packages not present in any snapshot.
  • -t to remove invalid package tarballs from the cache.
  • -y to download missing tarballs for installed packages.
• -Oe to display explicitly installed, top-level (i.e. unrequired) packages.
  Useful for detecting packages that you no longer need installed.
• check for confirming the overall health of your system.
• conf for generating and viewing various configuration files.
• deps command for analyzing dependency connections.

aura deps gcc --reverse --optional --open

This produces the following image:

• free to view information regarding software licenses of installed packages.
• stats for viewing various data about your system:
  • --groups (-g): All installed package groups.
  • --heavy: The Top 10 packages with the biggest installation footprint.
  • --lang (-l): Available localizations and how complete they are.
• thanks to view information about the people behind Aura.
• General support for doas across various commands.
• A proper offline info manual available via info aura.

Changed

• Breaking: The top-level command --viewconf is now called conf.
• Breaking: The top-level command --languages is now invoked by stats -l
  and also shows localization coverage for each language.
• Breaking: -L now prints to stdout.
• Breaking: -Bc no longer accepts an integer argument and instead clears
  all stale snapshots. "Stale" means that one or more packages in the snapshot
  is missing a tarball in the package cache.
• -A:
  • Breaking: The long form of -Aw has been changed from --downloadonly to
    --clone.
  • Breaking: -d used to stand for --deps but is now the shorthand for
    --dryrun. Dependency analysis can be done with the new top-level deps
    command.
  • Breaking: --ignore is now accepted multiple times with a single package
    argument, as opposed to the previous --ignore=foo,bar,baz.
  • -Ak now prompts you to continue after PKGBUILD diffs have been printed.
  • The performance of -As has been greatly improved.
  • -Ax now does nothing - build output is unsuppressed by default.
  • --devel has been renamed to --git, although the old name secretly still works.

Removed

• -P in its entirety.
• -As --head and -As --tail have been removed in favour of --limit.
• --ignorearch