[aur-general] Suggestions for dealing with packages that require root

[Phillip Smith]

Hi all,

I'm after some suggestions for how to deal with packages (namely amanda
[1]) that require root to build. In this particular instance, amanda needs
the user/group that it will run under to be present at compile time. Less
than ideal, but that's what upstream gives us.

At the moment, I check if the user/group 'amanda' already exist, and if
not, create them. This has the side effect that makepkg needs to be run as
root if the user/group doesn't exist. I then cleanup (delete) the
user/group at the end if I created them. That's messy enough already, but
it's been suggested that I use sudo to handle the user add/delete parts to
make the PKGBUILD friendlier to AUR helpers. I know helpers needs to work
with PKGBUILD's, not PKGBUILD's made to work with helpers, but perhaps
there is a middle-ground where we can all eat our cake? ;)

I don't want to include sudo as a makedepends since it requires
configuration to work properly, nor do I want to make the PKGBUILD
"intelligent" to try and auto-detect a privilege escalation tool (sudo or
su) which will lead to a bigger mess.

Does anyone have a smarter/cleaner/easier way to deal with this scenario?

Cheers,
~p

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/am/amanda/PKGBUILD