This post can be used for Arch Linux and EndeavourOS.

Recently, a change was committed that highly compresses AUR packages before the actual installation. This takes a lot of time: even on a fast machine, installing something like Chrome or Visual Studio (AUR packages) takes even minutes just for the compression phase. Since I typically remove the generated packages in the AUR cache after installation (e.g., “~/.cache/yay”), the compression is entirely useless to me.

To disable compression altogether, you can edit the file “/etc/makepkg.conf” (requires sudo, of course) and change the line:

into:

And you’re done! Now, even if the string “Compressing package…” is printed on the screen when installing an AUR package, that is actually a no-op.

If you don’t want to change the system file “/etc/makepkg.conf”, you can create this file in your user home, “~/.config/pacman/makepkg.conf”, whose contents take precedence over the ones of the system file. Just put the line:

And you’re done!