What is Reddit's opinion of yaourt?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Tip for when you do get your system up and running again:

• Always '-Syu' when upgrading via Pacman (or AUR helper if you use one; if you do, I highly recommend Pacaur over Yaourt - everyone says Yaourt isn't safe, however, I personally prefer Pacaur over Yaourt just because I like the way Pacaur works as opposed to Yaourt.

• Be considerate when installing anything outside of the official repositories. Just try to do your best due diligence: read the readme files, take a look at the code, etc.

• Don't be afraid to upgrade regularly but when you do, see the first point above

• Lastly, before upgrading, always check the latest news to confirm if there are any upgrades that require manual intervention

I'm a n00b and I've been successfully running Arch on multiple machines for about 6 months now without any issues (knock on wood). I keep seeing multiple posts about how upgrades brick people's systems but so far I've been lucky enough to avoid that by following the points I've listed above.

There's no need to uninstall. You can truly just follow those exact steps in the link I posted. For example, to upgrade Yaourt:

• download tarball from AUR page (e.g. wget https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ya/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz).

• extract tarball (e.g. tar xf yaourt.tar.gz).

• cd into the directory (e.g. cd yaourt) and run makepkg (e.g. makepkg -s) (edit: whoops - makepkg, not mkpkg. They did use a couple vowels this time)

• install newly built package (e.g. sudo pacman -U yaourt-1.5-1-any.pkg.tar.xz).

If you do not want to do anything with the package before installing, you can combine the last two steps using the -i flag for makepkg and skipping the call to pacman.

What "didn't work" for you?

It is an AUR package, you can't install it with pacman -S https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository#Installing_packages

So you need to press "Download snapshot", decompress it and run

makepkg -sri

Alternatively you can use a pacman wrapper like yaourt .

I guess since everyone seems to be mentioning their favorite AUR helper, I will mention packer. I used to use yaourt but had a few problems with it breaking on me and having to reinstall it with curl/makepkg/pacman -U. It happened to me twice (admittedly quite a long time ago) but it was enough for me to switch to packer.

packer -Syu

will get you all of the updates for all of your packages.

To get a list of packages installed from other sources, not necessarily just the AUR, /u/jumpwah has the right answer:

pacman -Qm

It will also list all packages that you built with abs I believe.

That is indeed the manual way of installing a package, it's still odd yaourt is broken tho... you could remove yaourt and package-query and then download them from the AUR again and reinstall them the manual way.

And then check of pamac still works.

To uninstall the repository version, simply run pacman -R yaourt. In order to replace it with the AUR version, you'll need to download it from the page https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/ by clicking "download snapshot" on the right side. Extract the archive into a folder and cd into it in a terminal. Then simply run makepkg -sri and the package should install any dependencies and itself.

Also, once you're done installing it you can remove archlinuxfr from /etc/pacman.conf and use pacman -Sc to remove unused repositories. Hope this helps!