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The current instructions tell users to perform two actions: - update the package database - install the jq package The only thing users need to or should be doing is actually installing the jq package -- regardless of which version is being installed. Guidelines on how to perform system updates are massively out of scope. In the case of partially performing a system update as a prerequisite for installing jq, the official guidance from Arch Linux is not to do this: partial updates are not supported, we refuse to support them, and anyone who does try to perform them anyway is assumed to know so much about their system that they clearly do not ever need help from anyone else (which is a good thing since they won't get it). The result is a frankensteined system that can only ever be supported by the person who frankensteined it to begin with. The only reason the package manager even allows it to occur in the first place is because other distributions using pacman might have different LTS policies, and because it would prevent expert users from being in control of their system, as per the traditional Unix philosophy: "Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." Consequences of performing partial updates without understanding the ramifications in extensive detail can include breaking the partially updated application (jq), breaking any application that shares a mutual dependency with the partially updated application (which jq is *lucky* to only depend on the ever-backwards-compatible glibc), or breaking the entire operating system by leaving armed traps behind for the next time a `pacman -S new-package` is executed and thereby breaks *its* cascading dependencies. See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported
jq
jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.
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Unix: 
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Windows:
If you want to learn to use jq, read the documentation at https://stedolan.github.io/jq. This documentation is generated from the docs/ folder of this repository. You can also try it online at jqplay.org.
If you want to hack on jq, feel free, but be warned that its internals are not well-documented at the moment. Bring a hard hat and a shovel. Also, read the wiki: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki, where you will find cookbooks, discussion of advanced topics, internals, release engineering, and more.
Source tarball and built executable releases can be found on the homepage and on the github release page, https://github.com/stedolan/jq/releases
If you're building directly from the latest git, you'll need flex, bison (3.0 or newer), libtool, make, automake, and autoconf installed. To get regexp support you'll also need to install Oniguruma or clone it as a git submodule as per the instructions below. (note that jq's tests require regexp support to pass). To build, run:
git submodule update --init # if building from git to get oniguruma
autoreconf -fi # if building from git
./configure --with-oniguruma=builtin
make -j8
make check
To build without bison or flex, add --disable-maintainer-mode to the
./configure invocation:
./configure --with-oniguruma=builtin --disable-maintainer-mode
(Developers must not use --disable-maintainer-mode, not when making
changes to the jq parser and/or lexer.)
To build a statically linked version of jq, run:
make LDFLAGS=-all-static
After make finishes, you'll be able to use ./jq. You can also
install it using:
sudo make install
If you're not using the latest git version but instead building a
released tarball (available on the website), then you won't need to
run autoreconf (and shouldn't), and you won't need flex or bison.
To cross-compile for OS X and Windows, see docs/Rakefile's build task and scripts/crosscompile. You'll need a cross-compilation environment, such as Mingw for cross-compiling for Windows.
Cross-compilation requires a clean workspace, then:
# git clean ...
autoreconf -i
./configure
make distclean
scripts/crosscompile <name-of-build> <configure-options>
Use the --host= and --target= ./configure options to select a cross-compilation environment. See also the wiki.
Send questions to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/jq or to the #jq channel (http://irc.lc/freenode/%23jq/) on Freenode (https://webchat.freenode.net/).