[aur-general] Is base an implicit dependency?

[Archange]

Le 27/07/2021 à 16:11, Filipe Laíns via aur-general a écrit :
> On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 11:15 +0200, Cedric Girard via aur-general wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to have a confirmation. I encountered a PKGBUILD on AUR
>> that is not building correctly except when systemd is present when
>> building. The maintainer considers the makedeps is implicit as systemd
>> is dragged by base metapackage.
>>
>> However devtools only ensures base-devel is present, not base, when
>> building in a clean chroot. And I could not find a mention in the wiki
>> of base expected to be present when writing a PKGBUILD.
>>
>> Could you confirm to me what are the guidelines? Does systemd
>> (make)dependency should be explicit or not?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
> Hi Cedric,
>
> Yes, see [1]. Packages in base can, and should, be omitted from dependencies.

This is not generally true. While base can arguably be implicitly 
depended on for most basic tools (e.g. standard POSIX things), library 
dependencies should still be listed for instance:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_package_guidelines#Package_dependencies

And we are subject to remove some packages, see 
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64028, 
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64029, 
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64030, 
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/64047.

Also, makedepencies != dependencies, so:

> Similarly, the base-devel group is assumed to be installed when building
> packages, see [2]. Its members should be omitted from makedepends and
> checkdepends.

yes, but once again base is not in building chroots, thus anything from 
base and not in base-devel required for building must be listed in 
makedepends, in this case systemd. I still have yet to find again where 
we discussed base in chroots/systemd in base-devel, but this is the 
current states of things so as long as it stays this way, systemd should 
be listed in makedepends if required.

> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Meta_package_and_package_group#Meta_packages
> [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#makedepends

Regards,
Bruno/Archange