Your question is basically about the difference between depends and makedepends. When you installed parity, pacman just downloaded the finished package as *.pkg.tar.xz for you and installed (runtime-) dependencies as you need them. If you set up abs [0] for you, you can build the package yourself, just update the abs tree, copy /var/abs/*/parity to ~/abs/parity and type makepkg -s. if you add -i to the makepkg command, it also tries to run pacman -U the_finished_package.pkg.tar.xz as root. In that order of doing things, makepkg (as told by the -s flag) will install cargo, because it needs the (make-) dependency to build the package. So uh, yeah, read up how ABS works and how you can create, maintain and fix archlinux packages for personal use/learning experience [1]. cheers! mar77i [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg