this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

Arch Linux

7759 readers
1 users here now

The beloved lightweight distro

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
1
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

The past few times I’ve run yay I’ve got these warnings about packages that are orphaned/not in the AUR. Based on the names I’m assuming these are leftover from the upgrade from kde plasma 5 to 6, are these safe to remove now? And secondly how would I find orphaned packages like that if I wasn’t using yay since I never installed these from the AUR?

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That used to be in the repositories I'm pretty sure and the aur package is pretty new, so I guess yay migrated it to use the aur one somehow instead of replacing it with krunner for the plasma 6 update?

And that probably applies to those others too

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Yes those are leftovers. Khotkeys got replaced with kglobalaccel - safe to remove but install kglobalaccel. Krunner5 is replaced by krunner, kquickcharts5 by kquickcharts. For kpeoplevcard i don't know

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Define safe. Your can recover from just about anything with a live USB by just reinstalling any missing packages. But that is only needed if you remove some vital packages, those in base or to do with your bootloader. Which is only a small list. And none of those will be in the AUR unless you explicitly opted into something critical (like zfs as your main filesystem, or a custom kernel).

Most things, especially GUI stuff is optional in Arch. You might break your GUI but you should always have access to the CLI to reinstall things like you did when you first set things up.

The only time I would be really wary is if trying to remove a package also tries to remove half your system packages. Then it is more likely to be required by something you want and should very carefully audit the list of packages it wants to remove.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

In this context, orphaned doesn't always mean you should remove it. It just means that nobody in AUR is taking responsibility to keep it updated. You still might have other packages from the AUR that depend on this one.

Since it is unmaintained, basically anyone can now claim ownership of that package in the AUR and push updates for it. Theoretically, someone could try to distribute malware in this way.

This is why it's important to check the diffs of your AUR updates.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I never knowingly installed these, the only packages I’ve intentionally installed from the AUR are heroic games launcher and 7-zip. And the only kde programs I’ve manually installed is the plasma-meta package, kde connect and ksnip. I think they were previously part of the plasma-meta package and have now been removed or replaced with the plasma 6 versions

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

That’s probably it. Package doesn’t exist anymore, but is available on AUR since 2024/03/16

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/krunner5/
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/krunner5

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Wow I seem to have loads

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Unfortunately, you're going to have to go through the list and decide whether you need each one