The AUR should not be thought of as a package manager repo. It should be thought of as a pastebin for pkgbuild scripts, i.e. build instructions. Running them without looking is the equivalent of blindly copying shell commands from stackoverflow.
If you are thinking “I want to install this package I found, it doesn’t exist in any repo, but their build instructions are complex and don’t have instructions for arch,” a pkgbuild is a great resource. At the very least you can read someone’s pkgbuild to see what dependencies and build steps worked for them (in the same way that you can disect a shell script line-by-line to understand what it’s doing).
The only official way to use the AUR is to manually download a pkgbuild file and use manually run makepkg to execute it. All the other tools that turn it into a convenient repo source (ex. yay, paru, pamac) are unofficial.
The AUR should not be thought of as a package manager repo. It should be thought of as a pastebin for pkgbuild scripts, i.e. build instructions. Running them without looking is the equivalent of blindly copying shell commands from stackoverflow.
If you are thinking “I want to install this package I found, it doesn’t exist in any repo, but their build instructions are complex and don’t have instructions for arch,” a pkgbuild is a great resource. At the very least you can read someone’s pkgbuild to see what dependencies and build steps worked for them (in the same way that you can disect a shell script line-by-line to understand what it’s doing).
The only official way to use the AUR is to manually download a pkgbuild file and use manually run makepkg to execute it. All the other tools that turn it into a convenient repo source (ex. yay, paru, pamac) are unofficial.