Julia package vs. Juliaup from AUR vs. shell command for Julia install on Arch Linux derivative?

General Usage
,
1

I recently jumped ship from Windows 11 to CachyOS, a derivative distribution of Arch Linux. As such, it uses the Arch package repos and has access to the Arch User Repository. As it stands, I have 3 install options:

  1. Install the Julia 1.12.6 package from the official Arch package repos. It lists https://julialang.org/ as the upstream URL, but I don’t know if this means that it’s officially distributed by the Julia project or if it’s simply repackaging the official releases. I assume this also means that Julia version management would be handled by the OS package manager (pacman) rather than juliaup.
  2. Install juliaup from the Arch User Repository (AUR). This would then let me use juliaup to manage my Julia installs, and the package manager to manage juliaup.
  3. Install juliaup using the one-line shell command from the docs.

I don’t have a good sense of the pros and cons of these methods, so I would appreciate some info/guidance on the recommended install method.

2

I’m on CachyOS. The simplest choice is probably juliaup-bin from the AUR. Then a simple juliaup add release should do the job.

3

Thanks!

4

AUR has a fairly bad security track record, especially in recent days. Even if I could personally vouch for whoever is maintaining the PKGBUILD, I would still use the official one-line shell command based install method. On CachyOS as well; it’s just not worth the risk using AUR as anything other than a last resort when there is no official distribution channel that works.

5

Nothing on Arch works better than juliaup. I havent touched the AUR in months because of the above mentioned issues but still have access to julia and updates through the official channels.

6

Look at Julia - ArchWiki

The warnings are correct:

This package is compiled against system libraries and is therefore unsupported by the upstream. […] Bugs reported to Julia’s maintainers against this binary will be closed.

There are weird bugs with using the archlinux package, and these are “wont fix, use juliaup”. I personally encountered bugs with cuda.

If you use the archlinux package, be aware of this and reproduce on “proper” julia installs before you open issues on the bugtracker (some maintainers get understandably grumpy if you waste their time because you didn’t read the fineprint on the archlinux wiki).

Otherwise, juliaup has very nice convenience features like julia +1.11 .... Use it.

7

Juliaup through the .sh launcher from Juliahub doesnt use the AUR even on Archlinux, its a complete bypass. Hence official.