I’ve tried almost every Arch Linux package manager. I can’t be certain I’ve tried every one because every day two new ones pop up. Exhibit A.
So why a new one?
Most of the existing AUR Helpers didn’t satisfy all of my requirements
- Visual selection of packages (yaourt, cower style)
- Having a static build
- Having no dependencies
- Strong defaults
- Capable of cleaning up it’s own mess.
Visual selection of packages
Having the repository packages displayed first saves me more time than any optimization I could do to searching and downloading.
Opinionated
Being written in Go, a very opinionated language, makes for a opinionated AUR helper.
Yay is always eager to warn when a package is orphaned or out-of-date. I also like lean systems therefore yay shows you the biggest bloat in your system (it’s written using node, I promise :) ).
In a future version, yay will warn when a package changes maintainer or it’s source baseurl changes.
What’s next
The next big feature to implement in yay will be following git commits in packages named *-git or whose source url is a git repo.