I’ve been using Arch on all my daily driver devices for years now. One of the main reasons for this is the AUR. It’s very convenient for installing all kinds of software, since it can build a full, native package from a simple build script written in bash. I personally have packages on the AUR and use it daily.

Anyway, I’ve thought many times of such a simple and easy solution being missing from other distros, but have never had the experience and motivation to create it. Recently, I used goreleaser to automatically build and release my project, ITD, for several distros at the same time. While doing so, I had an idea, so I went to check what goreleaser uses to build packages, and it turns out they have a separate library for this purpose: nfpm. This was the only thing missing for me to be able to build an AUR-like system.

I did notice one issue. It didn’t support Arch Linux packages, so I created a PR adding support for them. The PR is completely working and it has been reviewed and approved. So, I started working on my idea, and so far, it’s going really well. I’ve already been able to build and install multiple packages using my program on my Arch system and inside a Fedora and Debian docker container. I just uploaded my program now that I’ve finished implementing the basic features and testing them. I hope it ends up being useful.

Link to the repo with my new program: https://gitea.arsenm.dev/Arsen6331/lure

The README is very small right now, I’m working on making a better one.