Gelmo

@Khorne I know this isn't from source; I was just explaining the purpose and usefulness of pacman and PKGBUILD's in general. In regard to having multiple versions installed, installing as root, permissions, etc, if this is an issue for you then you are using pacman wrong. You should not be using an AUR helper without modifying the PKGBUILD to your liking. If you're grabbing the PKGBUILD and blindly installing, without reading what it does and adjusting it for your system, pacman is not the package manager for you. pacman does exactly what you tell it to do; no more, no less.

It's not just bout Arch and having automatic updates. There are other distributions that utilize pacman (the package manager we're discussing), even MSYS2 on Windows uses pacman. It's an open source and reliable way to compile things for your system utilizing the PKGBUILD file for all modifications and procedures, rather than adjusting makefiles. It allows you to maintain the integrity of the repository if using git, and to pull from the repo to update without losing your modifications or desired library locations or environment variables. There are many people that don't utilize automated updates, but still use pacman to compile and roll out software. Having a single file that sets the make instructions, environment variables, and places the compiled files in your desired location is extremely handy.

Yea, same here. I want as few variables as possible so I can manage my computer without making maintenance on it a project itself. I'll take a proper package manager that's oriented for my OS over snap or flatpak any day. If I wanted discrete libs, I'd use nix.

Looks like someone made an AUR package for this. Might want to add it to the OP https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/escribe-suite-bin/