Clearing up questions with AUR

Question

I've just got a few questions that are bugging me and I want to make sure I've got the right answers before moving on. I've read through all the documentation I can find and these questions still remain.
The AUR is comprised of two sections, Community and Unsupported. Community already seems to be in my repo list by default, right? At least I don't remember having to set it up. In my etc/pacman.conf I have core, extra, community, and the repo where you can get yaourt from (which I did add)
Yaourt says it searches unsupported and community. But can't pacman search through community since its a regular repo now? (i take it this wasn't the case in the past)
Can I install from source with yaourt or pacman from a regular webpage? Hypothetically I want openoffice from source, can I use a command and then openoffice source download link?
And the PKGBlds can be downloaded and built from yaourt too, right? (Does pacman offer this feature?)
One thing I am confused about is this: Can yaourt download and install from unsupported pkgbuilds from the website, or must I first download the file I want and then tell yaourt to install?
I'm sorry for all the questions, this is just slightly confusing and overwhelming. I'm coming from the apt-get world with beautiful synaptic. It's a lot to digest even with the Wikis and I'm afraid I'm just not quite getting it yet.
Dave

Answer 1

psych1610 wrote:I've read through all the documentation I can find and these questions still remain.
I doubt you found all the right wiki pages then, cause your questions should be dealt with there!
The AUR is comprised of two sections, Community and Unsupported. Community already seems to be in my repo list by default, right? At least I don't remember having to set it up. In my etc/pacman.conf I have core, extra, community, and the repo where you can get yaourt from (which I did add)
Are you sure you removed the "#" at the beginning of the line specifying the community name/server?
If you do a "pacman -Sy" all configured AND uncommented (not starting with #) repositories are synced. When up-to-date pacman shows:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
archlinuxfr is up to date
in your case... when a package from a repository (say [core]) is out of date, pacman downloads the up-to-date package list database again:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core                      23,8K  135,0K/s 00:00:00 [#####################] 100%
Now this database is located at /var/lib/pacman/sync/<repo>/<packagename> and when pacman searches for a specified keyword it skims trough all this description files to find your specified keyword, belonging to a certain package, in a certain repository and so on... If you set up the [community] repo properly like you said you did (did you?) pacman searches trough [community] too.
Yaourt says it searches unsupported and community. But can't pacman search through community since its a regular repo now? (i take it this wasn't the case in the past)
Up above you say you know AUR exists of two sections. One that is adobted by TU's, and is called [community] and which is supported by pacman, and the other that is purely maintained by users, called [unsupported] and thus not so safe, and so it's not supported by pacman, like the name implies to.
Because a lot of users wish to install package from AUR-unsupported too there is a fair amount of tools that make things easier for you to do that. Yaourt is one of them. Yaourt therefor searches to WHOLE AUR, including both [community] and [unsupported]. Before using this automated tools however, I think it is good that you know how to install packages from AUR the way Arch has intended, namely manually. In the wiki you can find pages containing this HowTo's, here is a link to a page that makes things very straightforward and easy to understand:
http://archux.com/page/installing-programs-aur
Can I install from source with yaourt or pacman from a regular webpage? Hypothetically I want openoffice from source, can I use a command and then openoffice source download link?
And the PKGBlds can be downloaded and built from yaourt too, right? (Does pacman offer this feature?)
One thing I am confused about is this: Can yaourt download and install from unsupported pkgbuilds from the website, or must I first download the file I want and then tell yaourt to install?
Please read the manual pages from the programs carefully to see all options, type in "man yaourt" in your console.
It seems that reading the wiki on pacman and installing packages, you missed out "abs". abs is the way for you to install from source. Have a look at the wiki, search for "abs" or "compiling packages" or "install from source", also have a look at the wikipage for makepkg, the tool that does the actual "building from source".
I'm sorry for all the questions, this is just slightly confusing and overwhelming. I'm coming from the apt-get world with beautiful synaptic. It's a lot to digest even with the Wikis and I'm afraid I'm just not quite getting it yet.
Dave
Well, don't hesitate to ask your questions here, you don't have to be sorry, this is what the forum is for. It is always good however to search for an answer yourself first. You say you read all the documentation, so you did try for yourself first, very good! Still I thing alot of your answers can be found in the wiki, or even on this forum. Providing good search terms is the key here.
I hope I could help you for this time, and for future times too
ps. sorry I may have repeated any earlier posts, mine took a bit to write