Basically, the AUR works by downloading source code and running a build script that builds the app specifically for an Arch system, right? So why isn’t there an equivalent that works on most or all distros? Almost every time, compiling a Linux app is just running the commands that the developer tells you to, and for the uncommon times there are distro-specific differences, they’re usually listed in the README. For many userspace apps, even building across different processor architectures requires little to no change in the commands required as long as there’s a platform specific compiler. Why isn’t there a cross-distro system that can download source code and run a build script while knowing what distro-specific commands to use based on the developer’s instructions? Heck, compiling an app on the system you plan on running it on can unlock a little more performance by taking advantage of compiler optimizations for that specific processor, and it doesn’t take that long on a reasonably modern computer anyway, so why isn’t there an incentive to do it more often?

  • Fabián Heredia
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    4 years ago

    The Nix package manager works on most distros and even on MacOS so most nixpkgs expresions work out of the box (except modules which are intended to simplify system configuration and are tailored to NixOS)

    https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/

    On the GNU side of thing there is Guix but lacks non-libre software. (Same principles and also great)