Arch Linux User Repository

That's good to know, but the AUR submission guidelines don't actually say any of this about replaces: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_submission_guidelines#Rules_of_submission

This is what it actually says:

Do not use replaces in an AUR PKGBUILD unless the package is to be renamed, for example when Ethereal became Wireshark. If the package is an alternate version of an already existing package, use conflicts (and provides if that package is required by others). The main difference is: after syncing (-Sy) pacman immediately wants to replace an installed, 'offending' package upon encountering a package with the matching replaces anywhere in its repositories; conflicts, on the other hand, is only evaluated when actually installing the package, which is usually the desired behavior because it is less invasive.

It actually suggests that replaces is what you want in this particular scenario, where we want people to immediately uninstall lwks-beta and install lightworks-beta when syncing. We want the more invasive behavior. The discussion on pacman does not seem very useful as it is not used to install AUR packages; AUR helpers are. There are also no AUR repositories to sync, so the pacman -Sy reference is interesting, but not useful to know with regard to the AUR.

I would edit the wiki page to align with what you've written here (it's very valuable to know!), but I don't understand it well enough. Is this something you could do?

And actually 'replaces' field is not served by AURweb RPC webcall interface, therefore AUR helpers ignore that field.

No, replaces is not proper to use instead of conflicts, and AUR submission guidelines say that 'replaces' should generally be avoided on AURweb.

I just updated to the Oct 12, 2023 build.

We're now using the cdn.lwks.com link to the .deb package instead of the older S3 link. This aligns with the lightworks package, and also simplifies maintenance because we don't need to bump as many variables. Also, if LWKS ever changes their CDN backend, the cdn.lwks.com link will probably still work.

My understanding is that the replaces array is enough according to the documentation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#replaces

But I'll add conflicts just in case.

I wasn't sure about the provides array, but adding it seems to be the right thing to do, so I've done that now. I was a bit confused as the lightworks package had lightworks in the provides array. I'm not sure what the effect is supposed to be based on the wiki, as I thought conflicts would force people to uninstall lightworks to install lightworks-beta.

Also please add conflicts=(lwks-beta), otherwise people who had that one installed previously and now try to migrate to this newly renamed package might face problems.

Thanks for the rename. Please kindly also add provides=(lightworks).

I've created a replacement package at lightworks-beta and submitted a merge request against lwks-beta to merge into lightworks-beta. Thanks for pointing this out, MarsSeed!

Please kindly rename this to lightworks-beta, to align with AUR/lightworks, and to upstream's release archive name.

Here's a PKGBUILD for August 23rd, 2023 build of Lightworks beta. You'll need to agree to be a beta tester and download the .deb package to the same folder as the PKGBUILD. Then run makepkg -si. LWKS recommends backing up your project data, which is super quick and easy: https://lwks.com/blog/shortcuts-5-backup-and-restore-video

Just bump the lwksver, sha512sums, and lwksbuild for newer builds.

# Maintainer: Marcin Nowak <marcin [dot] j [dot] nowak [at] gmail [dot] com>
# Contributor: Mateus Rodrigues Costa <charles [dot] costar [at] gmail [dot] com>
# Contributor: PieterDeBruijn <arch [at] pieterdebruijn [dot] nl [dot] com>
# Contributor: stjhimy <stjhimy [at] gmail [dot] com>
# Contributor: CYB3R <dima [at] golovin [dot] in>
# Contributor: Sarkasper <kasper [dot] menten [at] gmx [dot] com>
# Contributor: Scias <shining [dot] scias [at] gmail [dot] com>
# Contributor: darzki <darzki [at] o2 [dot] pl>
# Contributor: N30N <archlinux [at] alunamation [dot] com>
# Contributor: anthrit <anthrit [at] anthware [dot] com>
# Contributor: jamnor <software [at] vncompat [dot] org>

pkgname=lightworks-beta
lwksver=2023.2
lwksbuild=141887
pkgver=$lwksver
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Lightworks Beta is the public Beta branch for Lightworks, the professional video editing suite"
arch=('x86_64')
options=('!strip')
url="http://www.lwks.com/"
license=('custom')
depends=('cairo' 'gdk-pixbuf2' 'glib2' 'libjpeg-turbo' 'pango' 'curl' 'gtk3' 'portaudio' 'openssl' 'libgl' 'libtiff' 'libutil-linux' 'ffmpeg' 'glu' 'libedit' 'nvidia-cg-toolkit')
optdepends=('nvidia-utils: only for nVidia users' 'libc++: only for BlackMagic RAW support (BRAW)' 'libc++abi: only for BlackMagic RAW support (BRAW)')
provides=('lightworks-beta')
conflicts=('lightworks')
replaces=('lwks-beta')
source=(
    "Lightworks-${lwksver}-Beta-${lwksbuild}.deb"
    )

sha512sums=(
    'dfea7f9dc5385f1b7d862ba77373737bd425f7baf8525b321bd91fc00fb231d07024433d6430f351762e98d3b9b39946346fd343f647f768a3a6b01571f1be03'
    )

package() {
    msg2 "Extracting data.tar.xz"
    bsdtar -zxf data.tar.xz -C "$pkgdir"

    msg2 "Moving udev folder from /lib to /usr/lib"
    mv "$pkgdir"/lib/udev "$pkgdir"/usr/lib
    rmdir "$pkgdir"/lib

    msg2 "Copying copyright file and creating a license dir"
    install -Dm644 "$pkgdir"/usr/share/doc/lightworks/copyright \
    "$pkgdir"/usr/share/licenses/lightworks/copyright
    ln -sr "$pkgdir"/usr/share/licenses/lightworks "$pkgdir"/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname

    msg2 "Changing some needed permissions"
    chmod a+rw "$pkgdir"/usr/share/lightworks/Preferences
    chmod a+rw "$pkgdir"/usr/share/lightworks/"Audio Mixes"
}

I have another version of this PKGBUILD with a direct link that also works, not requiring you to manually download anything, which is what the latest PKGBUILD in this repository is using, but I'm leaving this one here as it's minimally useful in case the link/process changes.