[aur-general] Building Split Packages Re: PKGBUILD Review Request: syncevolution

[Justus Piater]

I just uploaded my package to AUR and ran

  aursync -c syncevolution-http

As the PKGBUILD specifies, this downloads and builds syncevolution, and
creates both the syncevolution and syncevolution-http packages.  It
indeed makes little sense to upgrade or install syncevolution-http
without syncevolution.  Also, running

  aursync -c syncevolution syncevolution-http

builds syncevolution only once, as I would expect.

However, if you have been running syncevolution and later install
syncevolution-http, the syncevolution build is useless.
Syncevolution-http does not require syncevolution to be built (if it is
already installed) - it just needs to patch and extract a Python script
from the source tree.  Thus, I could presumably override build() inside
package_syncevolution-http() with a no-op.

On the other hand, the impossibility [1] to correspondingly override
makedepends suggests that this is not the recommended way to proceed.

So, how should this be resolved:

(a) Leave it as-is, with an installation of syncevolution-http
    triggering a (needless) build of syncevolution?

(b) Avoid this build by overriding build() (and prepare()), but
    (inconsistently) not makedepends?

(c) Instead of a split package, package syncevolution-http independently
    (which would presumably cause a joint install to download the source
    tarball twice)?

Thanks,
Justus


[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD#pkgbase