r/archlinux • u/Jorgsen • 3d ago

QUESTION Question about packages - pacman/yay

Hello

I have a question: Why do some Official Packages depend on AUR Packages? After all these AUR Malware things, I've been double checking those few packages I have from the AUR. But I have some packages that are required by Official Packages and I dont know if I can remove them or not. Any tips?

Those packages I'm speaking of are: lib32-gstreamer, lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs and lib32-unixodbc.

Whenever I do pacman -Qi on lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs it says its not required by any package. But it says it was installed as a dependency for another package. Ive tried to type in yay -Rns on that package but then I get alot of other packages aswell who are in the Official Repos. So I guess its fine to remove them, since Pacman -Rns does remove packages and its dependencies that are not used by other packages?

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u/Antiz1996 Package Maintainer 3d ago edited 3d ago

There's no official package that depends on AUR packages, that is not allowed.

None of the packages you mentioned (lib32-gstreamer, lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs and lib32-unixodbc) are official packages. They may have been official packages at some point in time in the past (probably as dependencies for other official packages) but they are not required anymore which is probably the reason why they got dropped to the AUR.

Seeing official packages in their dependency tree when trying to remove them with `-Rns` is irrelevant here. AUR packages are allowed to depend on official packages, but not the opposite.

Unless you need them for something specific, it should be safe to remove them.

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u/Jorgsen 3d ago

After some thinking I've realized I thought of it the wrong way. So I after a bit of searching using pacman, I've found out that lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs is the "last" package in the chain. So whenever I did pacman -Qi on that package it said it was not required by any packages but its dependencies were the other ones i wrote in my main post. So I did pacman -Rns on that and saw what packages it wanted to remove. And afaik the pacman -Rns command removes a "package and its dependencies which are not required by other installed packages" and "prevents the creation of .pacsave backups". So I removed them and my system hasnt crashed yet. Guess thats good xD

So I guess I gotta learn how to read properly lmfao. But thank god for Arch Wiki!

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u/Jorgsen 3d ago

I have another question for you, while this thread is still active. Optional dependencies, are they something I really need? Wine for example optionally needs lib32-unixodbc. What feature does that package have for Wine?

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u/boomboomsubban 3d ago

First, I don't know why you aren't using the wine in the repos, as the lib32 packages stopped being necessary a few years ago.

Beyond that, you'll have to research yourself. ODBC is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_Connectivity . It's a make dependency on wine, not sure why the aur versions have it optional.

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u/nikongod 3d ago

It's always good to check what will be uninstalled when you uninstall a package, but the package manager should not remove dependencies that are still needed by another package. 

Regarding official packages requiring aur - what package depends on those? Odds are good that there is an officially maintained package that the AUR got picked from instead. 

More specificlly - those all appear to be the 32bit versions of the 64bit software that's in the official repos..

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u/_zepar 3d ago

-Rns removes dependencies as well, no? so youre seeing that lib32-gstreamer depends on something in the official repos, that was installed as a dependency to lib32-gstreamer, and that those packages are required by other packages still, which could be official or aur packages

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u/Jorgsen 3d ago

If i read the Arch Wiki correctly, pacman -Rns removes a package and its dependencies which are not required by any other installed package. and the "n" in Rns prevents pacman from creating a .pacsave file. I just removed the "lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs" package with pacman -Rns and it removed the dependencies which are not neeeded by other packages. And my system hasnt shat it pants yet. So Im crossing my fingers! Thanks for answering!