Arch Linux User Repository

@Rhinoceros Sadly there are no alternatives at all, and putting octopi is generally stupid. It seems like they also abandoned it. More precisely, they did not abandon it, but they poorly support it compared to pamac.

@naruto522ru I just tried octopi, but it's simultaneously too heavy and not customisable enough compared to kalu.

Ah right. Sorry, I thought you were asking me to take over the maintenance of the AUR package itself, but it appears you are talking about forking upstream. Unfortunately that would be a bit beyond me.

I had a look at the various kalu forks, but they all seem to only make minor changes, e.g. translations.

Regarding building, I previously patched kalu-kde to build, but it looks like there are new problems, and now I can't get it to build any more.

FWIW, it still seems to work fine for me. I wasn't able to install it as a new package due to the dependencies, but I just copied over the files from my old machine and it just works.

I'll keep using it till it breaks though as nothing out there is even close to as nice as this. If I had the skill to fix and maintain it. I certainly would.

@Rhinoceros I personally have not seen alternatives to this software. Maybe you know? The point here is not that the developer is not showing any activity, but to repair this software. On GitHub, one user forked it, but why did I get an error during the build. Which will work with the new pacman. Repair and all for 3-5 years is enough until again some critical innovations are introduced.

@naruto522ru We could submit an orphan request in theory I guess, but there's no real point. If jjacky is unavailable, then upstream won't be providing updates any more, and this package is useless anyway; there's no much point maintaining it. I just checked upstream's GitHub and jjacky hasn't made a commit in 24 months, and replied 20 months ago, so I suppose it's probably time to consider alternatives.

@Rhinoceros Can you handle the maintenance of this package? Since nothing has been heard from the author and maintainer of the program for a long time.

I'm not sure if the maintainer/upstream jjacky is still around. Hopefully everything is okay! In any case, there is a patch proposed in the issue that works. Alternatively there is kalu-kde that already incorporates this patch. (kalu-kde is otherwise identical to this, but incorporates statusnotifier so that, if requested, the tray icon can auto-hide in KDE, and probably other DEs too).

@akovia Yeah, the same thing with me. We have to wait until they fix it.

@tpreissler

Build fails for me :/

collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [Makefile:834: kalu] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/nuc/Downloads/kalu/src/kalu'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:1474: all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/nuc/Downloads/kalu/src/kalu'
make: *** [Makefile:657: all] Error 2

==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().

Aborting...

I managed to compile a fork supporting latest pacman. Here is the PKGBUILD:

pkgname=kalu
pkgver=4.3.0.r9.ga46975c
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Upgrade notifier w/ AUR support, watched (AUR) packages, news [GIT]"
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
url="https://jjacky.com/$_pkgname"
license=('GPL3+')
depends=('dbus' 'polkit' 'gtk3' 'pacman>=5.2' 'curl' 'libnotify'
         'notification-daemon')
makedepends=('perl' 'groff' 'git' 'autoconf')
source=("git://github.com/deraffe/kalu.git#branch=pacman-5.2-next")
md5sums=('SKIP')
provides=($_pkgname)
conflicts=($_pkgname)

pkgver() {
  cd "$srcdir/$pkgname"
  git describe --long --tags | sed 's/\([^-]*-g\)/r\1/;s/-/./g'
}

build() {
  cd "$srcdir/$pkgname"
  ./autogen.sh
  ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-git-version
  make
}

package() {
  cd "$srcdir/$pkgname"
  make DESTDIR="$pkgdir/" install
  chmod 750 "$pkgdir"/usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d
  chown 0:102 "$pkgdir"/usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d
}

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