[aur-general] Cycled dependencies in AUR

[Andreas 'Segaja' Schleifer]

On 8/25/21 4:03 AM, Mario Finelli via aur-general wrote:
> I've been debating with myself for a little while now on how to best to
> respond to this. On the one hand I totally get it that it's annoying to
> not be able to just `$helper -S package` and need to either manually
> edit the pkgbuild, or call --nocheck, or whatever. On the other hand
> running the test suite is extremely valuable to pick up breakage between
> both gem versions and ruby versions. Fortunately, for ruby packages the
> dependency cycle is usually only for checkdepends so once you've built
> and installed the package the first time upgrades should be smooth even
> with the check.
>
> It's possible that this is actually only something that we care about
> for the official repositories and so I'm out of place by including them
> on these AUR packages. I admit that I haven't seen circular dependencies
> elsewhere on the AUR, but I also don't install that many packages so
> maybe they just exist on packages that I haven't seen or don't use.
>
> Anyway, if the consensus (or even just some TU telling me to do it) is
> to get rid of the check() functions and checkdepends then I of course
> will comply -- I'll just be a little sad about it :)


I have also a few ruby-* packages in AUR and I'm aware that they also 
bring in cyclic check dependencies, especially in the ruby-rails world 
and their subpackages.

I'm in general also a fan of having tests for packages since they do 
serve a purpose. But in my dealings with these packages I have an 
increasingly harder time to manage the cycles and keeping my local repo 
up-to-date. Especially when a new rails version comes out.

If there is a consensus from this thread to avoid such cycles then I 
will be happy to update my packages and just comment out the check() 
related lines. That way if people want to run them later they can 
re-enable them when the inspect the PKGBUILD file (which they should do 
anyway during install).


Best regards

Segaja