I agree with your statement that a AUR helper with --no-confirm is a scary thing.
But that makes me even more surprised to see that ./arch-ppa setup actually installs the cower from AUR without any user confirmation or review.

Is there a particular reason why this application is not packaged as an AUR page with cower (or some other helper) as a dependency?
That would make it more transparent to users what is being installed, and give users a chance to review installed AUR dependencies.

Building one of the AUR packages failed. I tried to arch-ppa clean which then gave error removing chroot folder with "Operation not permitted." Manually trying rm -rf as root fails to remove the folder with "Operation not permitted" error. lsattr doesn't show any attributes.

Tried rebooting, same thing.

I can't delete this folder. What sort of attributes were set?

I am using arch-ppa on a remote arch linux arm server to build packages for my nVidia Jetson TK1, also running arch linux arm.

I have run

./arch-ppa add ros-indigo-desktop-full ./arch-ppa build ros-indigo

I get this output

$ ./arch-ppa build ros-indigo-armv7h $ makechrootpkg -r /home/sebastien/ros-indigo/chroot -l ros-indigo-armv7h -- -Ai ==> Making package: ros-indigo-cpp-common 0.5.7-1 (Fri May 20 22:54:52 UTC 2016) ==> Retrieving sources... -> Found ros-indigo-cpp-common-0.5.7-0.tar.gz ==> Validating source files with sha256sums... ros-indigo-cpp-common-0.5.7-0.tar.gz ... Passed ==> Making package: ros-indigo-cpp-common 0.5.7-1 (Fri May 20 22:54:56 UTC 2016) ==> Checking runtime dependencies... ==> Checking buildtime dependencies... ==> Installing missing dependencies... error: target not found: ros-build-tools error: target not found: ros-indigo-catkin ==> ERROR: 'pacman' failed to install missing dependencies. ==> ERROR: Build failed, check /home/sebastien/ros-indigo/chroot/ros-indigo-armv7h/build

ros-build-tools and ros-indigo-catkin both have folders in the src/ folder.

How does arch-ppa decide the order in which it builds packages?

Feature Request

I'm looking to link ~/arch-ppa/arch-ppa to my /usr/bin folder so that I can call it without needing to be in the git directory. Currently when running anything, it attempts to create all files in /usr/bin:

host@host1:~|⇒  arch-ppa list eyc
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/usr/bin/src’: Permission denied
## Creating arch chroot ...
$ mkdir /usr/bin/chroot
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/usr/bin/chroot’: File exists

Can you make sure it follows the symbolic link or uses a default repo directory?

I've tried seeing if it's a package that I can install, but nope.

Feature Request

Avoid stuff like:

:: atom-editor-beta downloaded to /src
warning: alsa-lib is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: gconf is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: gtk2 is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: libgnome-keyring is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: libnotify is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: libxtst is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: nodejs is available in community (ignore this with --ignorerepo=community)
warning: nss is available in core (ignore this with --ignorerepo=core)
warning: python2 is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: git is available in extra (ignore this with --ignorerepo=extra)
warning: npm is available in community (ignore this with --ignorerepo=community)

Perhaps it is possible to detect when the package isn't installed and then throw an error/warning?

Feature Request

I wanna automate git control because it's annoying to do manually and it just follows a structure.

We can probably do a git init and manage src/ in the .arch-ppa directory. I would recommend also creating a .gitignore with something like:

chroot/

# repos
cwre/

# self
.gitignore

So we don't try putting the chroot or repo under git control, there's no reason to.

Structure of commits

After an arch-ppa add package we will git add src/ again and git commit -m "added $packages"

After an arch-ppa build $repo ensure that $repo is in .gitignore.

host@host1:~/git/arch-ppa|master⚡ 
⇒  sudo pacman -Syu
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
error: failed retrieving file 'eyc.db' from disk : Couldn't open file /home/host/git/arch-ppa/eyc/eyc.db
error: failed to update eyc (download library error)
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

New packages when built aren't being signed despite me having a gpg key. The script doesn't seem to be prompting me to sign anymore for some reason.

Many of the packages installed by pacman result in the following warning:

warning: directory permissions differ on /home/barnaby/AURPPA/chroot/root/var/

This warning also appears for some of the var subdirectories, such as cache, lib and cache/pacman.

Later on in the script, makechrootpkg fails with the following error:

==> ERROR: /home/barnaby/AURPPA/chroot/root/etc/makepkg.conf not found.
Aborting...
==> ERROR: Could not download sources.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12314451/accessing-bash-command-line-args-vs

I can't find cower in the AUR directly. Could cower be outdated/not maintained anymore?

These days there is a large number of component aur helpers that could probably be used as a drop in replacement for cower. So changing this should be a minimal effort.