Pamac only updates binary packages but not packages from git repositories

Question

wanted to share the following problem + solution since it took me a longer time to figure this out and hope it can save you some time stumbling upon this post:

I am using Manjaro and install the following three different types of packages:

• packages which are in the main repositories and I can install them via pacman -S
• packages which are only in the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) and are in binary format which can be installed via pamac build
• packages which are only in the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) and have to be self-compiled (e.g. *-git packages) also via pamac build

Now I have had the following two issues:

• binary packages via pamac build have never been updated running pacman -Syyu
• self-compiled packages via pamac build have never been updated running pacman -Syyu

Answer 1

So the first issues have been solved adding the following two lines to my update script:

pamac checkupdates -a
pamac upgrade -a

Where -a stands for AUR

I had this for a longer time in my script and it has been working fine and I thought I was done since now all packages installed via pacman have been updated via pacman -Syyu and all packages from AUR have been updated via the above commmand.

I was wondering though, why the *-git packages I installed (which had frequent updates on the master / main branch) were never updated.

So I dug into the issue and had to adapt my script to the following:

pamac checkupdates -a --devel
pamac upgrade -a --devel

Where --devel includes development packages (like *-git).

Now I could notice that running this command takes way longer checking for updates, since -a just checks the packages in the AUR if they are newer (fast) but if the is a *-git package and there was no update in AUR but only in the git repository, it would not pick it up.

The new command including --devel however, took way longer, since it was asking first AUR for updates (quick) + for development packages it was also asking the repository in the back to check if there have been any updates.

Now finally I can keep all packages up-to-date with this simple script:

pacman -Syyu
pamac checkupdates -a --devel
pamac upgrade -a --devel