Doesn't [community] mean AUR? [SOLVED]

Question

Just installed Arch yesterday, coming from Ubuntu 10.4.  I'm mostly liking it.
But I'm confused about why I can't install the packages I had before.
I thought that enabling [community] in the pacman.conf file meant I could get all those user packages.
But pacman does not seem to see them.
One example of many: an ftpd server.
I search AUR and find these:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0 … &SB=n&SO=a
That's 17 results, including the one I'm looking for, proftpd
And yet pacman only sees these:
# pacman -Ss ftpd
extra/bftpd 4.0-1
    Small, easy-to-configure FTP server
community/sshguard 1.5-13
    Brute force detector for SSH, Exim, VSFTPD and more. Blocks by ip with iptables
community/vsftpd 3.0.2-2
    Very Secure FTP daemon
So how do I ge to the ones in AUR?
Last edited by jtgd (2013-06-24 08:53:55)

Answer 1

Trilby wrote:
Two approaches to using AUR packages:
1a) download aur tarball with wget, curl, via the webpage, or a tool like cower
1b) (optional depending on choice in last step) uncompress the tarball with gzip/tar programs, or something like atool
1c) cd to the new directory and run makepkg, potentially with the -s and/or -i flags ... or in some cases perhaps the -e and -f, or many others
1d) (optional depending on choice in last step) run pacman -U <newly-create-pkg.tar.gz>
1e) if anything happened to go wrong, you can pinpoint exactly where it went wrong, and either fix it, or have the information needed to get quick help from the forums
SUM of option 1) learn about your system and it's package management and have control of what is happening.
Also note each step has many choices.  This may seem intimidating at first (but probably not if you came from gentoo) - but each choice is well documented, so you can easily learn what they all do.
Thanks again Trilby.
I'm the kind of newbie that would start with approach 1.
I like the idea of knowing what's going on (I'm a software engineer)
(As you say, anyone choosing approach 2 probably shouldn't be here)
I assume from 1a and 1b that what I download is source.
I assume from 1c that makepkg does ./configure && make all, and then tars to the .tar.gz that pacman is expecting
and from 1d that pacman -U simply installs from the local package instead of what it finds in the repository.
That all seems reasonable to me
When I used Gentoo (2004-2005) I was frustrated with many packages which did not compile, sometimes I would delve into the errors and try to fix them.
As long as things eventually install without a big problem then I'll be ok with it.
I'll just miss the convenience of pacman -Syu to update everything I have installed, mostly because I won't know that a new [AUR] version is available unless I go and search for it.
I knew going into this that Arch wasn't going to be easy, but I still think it's worth it.