[aur-general] Cycled dependencies in AUR

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2021, at 15:12, Mikhail f. Shiryaev via aur-general wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Today I tried to build ruby-rubocop [1] package and it's in a strange
> state. A lot of packages for the package are cross-dependent for the check,
> for example ruby-ruby-progressbar [2] and ruby-fuubar [3]. The proposal of
> how to solve it from Mario [4] is to skip the check() phase, see comment
> [5].
> 
> The same is valid for package ruby-rubocop-performance [6] that is
> dependency for rubocop check and requires it to be built
> 
> IMHO the state when the packages aren't able to be built by the simple AUR
> helper command like `yay -S ruby-rubocop` should be considered as room for
> improvement.
> 
> If I'm wrong, please say so. But I'd like to have AUR packages in an easily
> installable state and not passing additional arguments like `--nocheck` for
> makepackage commands.
> 
> [1] - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby-rubocop
> [2] - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby-ruby-progressbar/
> [3] - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby-fuubar/
> [4] - https://aur.archlinux.org/account/supermario
> [5] - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby-rubocop-rspec/#comment-823420
> [6] - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby-rubocop-performance/
> 
> Best regards,
> Mikhail f. Shiryaev
> 
> p.s. Mario, sorry for sending you two messages.
> 
> >
> 

There's not really much that can be done to work around this, since the dependency also exists upstream. Potentially, AUR helpers can detect these scenarios and do a first pass with `--nocheck`, and then a second rebuild.

Note that this isn't the only instance of a circular dependency like this.
Another known similar situation is rust, which requires rust to be built [1]. Again,the package only reflects upstream's situation.

BTW: You might also be interested in quarry[2]. 

[1]: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/rust/
[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ruby#Quarry

-- 
Hugo Osvaldo Barrera