Blinky

blinky is an AUR-helper that is intended to complement the package manager pacman in Archlinux. It supports searching for, installing and upgrading packages from the AUR and is especially built for making upgrades of AUR-packages as painless as possible.

Core Principles

The principles that blinky is based upon are the following:

• Require minimal user interaction: All files to be reviewed (PKGBUILD, install-files) are presented for review directly at the beginning, afterwards everything is built in one go with no further user interaction necessary; as soon as it is clear that one package of this subtree did not pass review, blinky stops asking for reviews of a subtree of the dependency graph
• Build as much as possible: if some packages fail review, blinky still builds and installs all subtrees of the dependency-graph that still fully passed review
• Do not mix AUR and repos: Both are very different in their concept, therefore AUR and repos should not be mixed, for the repos we already have pacman, no need to reimplement it
• Be as close to pacman's CLI-interface as possible: blinky uses the very same flags as pacman wherever possible, because tooling should be consistent
• Be clean: Dependencies from AUR will be installed with the dependency-flag set, makedepends will be removed after building if they haven't been installed previously; blinky is drop-in software and migrating away from blinky is easily possible as it does not save any relevant state outside of the ArchLinux package management system.

How to get it

Just install this package from AUR.

How to use it

In particular the currently available options are

• package installation: blinky -S <package> [<package> ...]
• package search: blinky -Ss <package> [<package> ...]
• detailed package info: blinky -Si <package> [<package> ...]
• package updates: blinky -Syu
• clean cache: blinky -Sc or blinky -Scc
• explicitly rebuild packages: blinky -Sr [<package> ...] or blinky -Srr [<package> ...]

blinky will store its data according to the XDG_BASE_DIR-specification, specifically in the directories specified by the XDG_CACHE_HOME (build-files and built packages, ~/.cache/blinky by default) and XDG_DATA_HOME (rewiew-results, ~/.local/share/blinky by default) environment variables respectively.

How to tweak

To enable tab completion in zsh, copy the completion/_blinky file into a directory in your $FPATH (or into a new directory that you add to the $FPATH before compinit is called in your zsh startup).

Completion of package names requires querying AUR and thus has a high latency. To avoid blocking the shell accidentally when completing blinky -S <TAB> (which would result in a list of all AUR packages), a minimum of 4 characters needs to be provided to trigger a query. This can be modified through zstyle:

zstyle :completion:expand-word:complete:blinky:pkgcomp: numbers 4

This only applies to install operation. Locally installed packages get completed for the -Sr* operations regardless of the number of provided characters.