> Sorry, what I meant was: when I need to manage the version of something carefully, I just compile it from source and that's OK with me. My understanding is that people use the AUR for this on Arch, and the pains don't seem worth it.
Nobody's making you use the AUR! If you want to 'make && sudo make install' you can do that all day long.
The AUR value add is that other people have already figured out recipes for how to take the equivalent of 'make && sudo make install' and generate a package you can mange with the package manager.
There exist plenty of tools to automate all AUR interactions, but none of these will ever be included in Arch's main repos, since they are not a core part of Arch itself. This is to maintain a sharp delineation between properly supported Arch packages and the more wild west AUR recipes. That said, once you download a PKGBUILD from the AUR, you can use the same official tools to build and install the package that are used for the distro proper.
When I want to build from source, and something isn't in the AUR, I just spend the 5 minutes to make a proper PKGBUILD for myself. It is very easy and it simplifies management of things.
Nobody's making you use the AUR! If you want to 'make && sudo make install' you can do that all day long.
The AUR value add is that other people have already figured out recipes for how to take the equivalent of 'make && sudo make install' and generate a package you can mange with the package manager.
There exist plenty of tools to automate all AUR interactions, but none of these will ever be included in Arch's main repos, since they are not a core part of Arch itself. This is to maintain a sharp delineation between properly supported Arch packages and the more wild west AUR recipes. That said, once you download a PKGBUILD from the AUR, you can use the same official tools to build and install the package that are used for the distro proper.
When I want to build from source, and something isn't in the AUR, I just spend the 5 minutes to make a proper PKGBUILD for myself. It is very easy and it simplifies management of things.