I have a friend that complained about the incredible amount of time makepkg takes to compress the google-chrome AUR package when installing it on a netbook with a low performance CPU.

Since he and I are not really concerned about the size of the package, I decided to take a quick look to see if I could disable the compression. It only took a moment of looking at the makepkg manual.

# nano /etc/makepkg.conf

#PKGEXT='.pkg.tar.xz'
PKGEXT='.pkg.tar'
#SRCEXT='.src.tar.gz'
SRCEXT='.src.tar'

Now when installing google-chrome from the AUR, the archive is instantly created and installed. I’m keeping the change even on my computers with much higher performance CPUs.