@ShayBox I vigorously disagree with your statement!
Starting with the obvious first point that software designed for a generic platform is usually meant to be self-contained and hence generic, does not mean one should not attempt to package it. I am very glad to be able to for example install electron based apps (signal-messenger, vscode, ...) not via some download link but via a package manager. This comes with the upsides of having dependency management, versioning and automatic updating built-in.
Secondly, the server is clearly not running as root as can be easily seen from the systemd units and the management script. I have no clue why you would imply otherwise. For the purpose of having an isolated user for running the server, a new papermc user is created. The user has only access to the files which are necessary to run the server. Running the server as the user with which you are logged in is not a good idea as any exploit affecting minecraft will automatically has potentially much more devastating consequences since it can read from and write to a lot more paths.
In conclusion, I strongly suggest that you rethink whether you want to recommend others to run their servers as you describe it. I have no objection if you personally prefer to run the manually downloaded jar file as the user you are logged in with, without any management service, but I urge you to refrain from suggesting others that this is a good solution.
Pinned Comments
edh commented on 2019-09-03 10:54 (UTC) (edited on 2019-10-22 09:52 (UTC) by edh)
Unfortunately, upstream does not really have proper releases but instead points to build-versions of the software. Note, I will not push every new build of the package to the AUR but I will update the package upon new minecraft releases, e.g. for 1.14.4 to 1.14.5.