helpers?

In the article "Yaourt is Dead! Use These Alternatives for AUR in Arch Linux" (https://itsfoss.com/best-aur-helpers/), Ambarish Kumar wrote:

So, how do you use AUR then? Well, you need a different tool to install software from AUR. Arch’s package manager pacman doesn’t support it directly. These ‘special tools’ are called AUR helpers.

Actually, it isn't really necessary to use "AUR helpers" to install software from the Arch User Repository (AUR). The manual build process is laid out at the Arch wiki's "Arch User Repository" page:

Installing packages from the AUR is a relatively simple process. Essentially:

    1. Acquire the build files, including the PKGBUILD and possibly other required files, like systemd units and patches (often not the actual code).
    2. Verify that the PKGBUILD and accompanying files are not malicious or untrustworthy.
    3. Run makepkg -si in the directory where the files are saved. This will download the code, resolve the dependencies with pacman, compile it, package it, and install the package.

However, many users enjoy the convenience of AUR helpers, which are discussed at the Arch wiki's "AUR helpers" page. Note the following warning highlighted and emphasized at the top of the page:

Warning: AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. You should become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems.

That page also has some important tables that users should check before choosing an AUR helper to use. Note that yaourt is listed in the "Discontinued or problematic" table.

I don't use much software from the AUR, but I've been using yaourt sometimes, when I don't go with the manual build process. I don't think that yaourt is actually "dead" because there's been some commit activity as recently as this past March (see: https://github.com/archlinuxfr/yaourt). Still, I decided to install aurman to use instead of yaourt, in Arch as well as in Antergos.

aurman is kinda cool in that it employs a lot of the same options as pacman. I didn't find a manpage for aurman, but usage info can be found with the aurman --help command (or with aurman -h).

aurman does seem to work fine here, but I prefer to use the manual build process for installing AUR packages, and for installing newer versions of those packages. I'll continue to use aurman for query operations, and maybe for checking for available updates (although it's no big deal to simply check a package's AUR page to see if a newer version is available).