I'm trying to rebuild an installed package.

The following command output is not self-explanatory:

% aur sync gdown -C
==> Using [aur] repository
sync--filter: targets removed: gdown
sync: there is nothing to do

The message doesn't explain why gdown was "removed", despite being set on the command line. I referred to the man page for aur-sync and read through every option, but wasn't able to find anything that documented this behavior. Also, sync--filter is the name of a command, but nothing seems to explain the expected behavior of that command.

Is it the case that aur-sync is unable to rebuild a package that has already been installed with the latest version, but now must be rebuilt due to changes in dependencies? If so, it would be helpful to mention this fact in the man page, as well as what the intended workflow is.

The workaround seems to be:

cd ~/.cache/aurutils/sync/gdown
aur build
sudo pacman -S gdown

This seems unintuitive and awkward, especially the dependence on manually navigating to a directory inside ~/.cache.