[tremon]

With a bit more structure, you could change that to: every package in AUR is actually registered as foo/maintainer under the hood, and installing the package without maintainer name pins it to the currently active version. Package adoption can then be formalized as a new maintainer publishing their own version of the package, and users of an already-installed package need to issue an explicit command to switch over to the new maintainer's version.

[Pay08]

Or, have actual user repos like a normal distro.

[jolmg]

They do. There's a list of them on the Arch Wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unofficial_user_repositorie...

The problem with user repos vs the AUR is that you're trusting the maintainer behind them instead of inspecting the PKGBUILD and fetched sources yourself.

[Pay08]

And they're incredibly unpopular.

The entire problem is that people weren't inspecting PKGBUILDs. At least with user repositories, you have someone who can build a reputation for trustworthy packages. There's a reason why every other distro does user repos.

[ptx]

What do you mean? Their package manager allows you to add additional repositories, if that's what you want.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

How is that different?