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Comment by LeafStorm | Hacker News Reader

And the AUR is largely possible because of pacman. Debian and RPM packages are very complex, and take a lot of effort to build, so even if there was a large collection of package source files available, downloading and building them is not an especially efficient solution for getting fresh software.

Whereas pacman packages are simple enough that an arbitrary package can be built using a single (admittedly quite large) shell script from another single source file.

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This is a very important point. The learning curve for building Arch packages with pacman is ridiculously low compared with RPM or Debian packages.

My biggest grief back when I used Arch was the missing support for signed packages. Has there been any work in that direction in the meantime?

There's been significant progress in that direction. Package signing[1] is the major new feature in pacman 4[2].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Package_signing

[2] http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/NEWS

How is it difficult to build a Debian package? I often make quick'n'dirty debian packages by hand.

In a directory (let's say /tmp/PKG) put all your files in the proper tree (/tmp/PKG/usr/local/bin, etc); then create a DEBIAN folder (/tmp/PKG/DEBIAN) with a control file in it. The control file structure is quite straightforward.

You can add preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm scripts as needed (in whatever language you fancy, sh, perl, etc) too. And that's about it, dpkg -b /tmp/PKG mypackage.deb.

Try backporting a package that depends on packages whose versions are older in the target release. It is a real nightmare and the packages themselves already exist. This is the most common use case I encounter that it much better handled by Arch.

Allan McRae (pacman developer) done some good writing about the signing package of Pacman on his blog, in three parts.

- http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-1-makep...

- http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-2-pacma...

- http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-3-pacma...

AFAIK, The next version of pacman will support package signing. I suppose signed packages should begin to appear in the repositories as soon as pacman 4.0 is out.

It's already in -testing.

Yes, they just added it.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Package_signing

Its been a bit of a headache for me, but that's mostly because I can't just blindly `pacman -Syu` through the update.

Small correction, rpm can be complex, but a basic package is really easy. A few lines of package.spec file an a tarball of the package source. rpmbuild or mock handle all the grunt work of building the actual package and making a repo is as simple as running createrepo.

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