Dennis Lee

I recently installed Interlink from the AUR. I’ll be writing about the choice of email client in a future post, but this post is about how I dealt with the broken AUR package for Interlink and how you can deal with broken AUR packages in general.

The Problem

First I tried just a simple yay -S interlink-bin, but that gave me this:

curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
==> ERROR: Failure while downloading http://repository.binaryoutcast.com/projects/interlink/releases/latest/interlink-52.9.7433.linux-x86_64-gtk3.tar.xz

Ok, so it tried to download a file that doesn’t exist. It gives us the path to the file, so I went to the file’s parent folder to see if I could figure out what the problem was. It appears that the developer has released version 52.9.7463, and removed 52.9.7433, the one we were looking for! I flagged the package as “Out of Date” on the AUR page.

The Solution

I use yay as an AUR helper. It has an option called --editmenu, which gives you the option to edit the PKGBUILD before installing. Let’s try it:

yay -S interlink-bin --editmenu

pkgver=52.9.7433
source_x86_64=("http://repository.binaryoutcast.com/projects/interlink/releases/latest/interlink-$pkgver.linux-x86_64-gtk3.tar.xz")

OK, so we just have to fix the pkgver and it’ll grab the right file!

==> Validating source_x86_64 files with sha256sums...
    interlink-52.9.7463.linux-x86_64-gtk3.tar.xz ... FAILED
==> ERROR: One or more files did not pass the validity check!

Oh. OK, how about we just delete the sha256sums and sha256sums_x86_64 checksums from the file. That way, it can’t fail because there’s nothing to check, right?

==> ERROR: Integrity checks are missing for: source_x86_64 source

Oh. So, is there a way to tell it to skip integrity checks on the downloaded file? Turns out, there is.¹

sha256sums=('SKIP')
sha256sums_x86_64=('SKIP')

And with that, the package installs!