builds don't seem to be using locally available (cached) aur packages for dependencies (but rebuilt them)

[lordunsu]

Concrete example where I noticed it: qt5-webengine does not use the previously built and locally available qt5-webchannel package. See log of qt5-webengine build below. Maybe something in my config (added below as well) is wrong? But at least I didn't find anything in the documentation concerning that. On the other hand, the comment in here seems to imply that those packages should be used.

Dependency was built successfully:

(partial) Build log:
qt5-webengine.log

config:
docker-compose.txt

[Lukas-Heiligenbrunner]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to look into other people’s issues!
The issue you found comes from a pretty old version of the builder. Back then, all PKGBUILDs were built inside the same Docker container, and I was using makepkg instead of paru. That meant you had to manually build all AUR package dependencies before building the actual package you wanted. That is the reason why I added the aurcache repo as a source repo to the builder pacman.conf.

These days, every build runs in a fresh container, and I use paru to handle dependencies automatically. Because of that, I removed the aurcache repo entry from pacman.conf to improve build stability. The backend now keeps track of which AUR dependencies belong to which package.
For example:

• Package A depends on AUR package C
• Package B also depends on AUR package C

When building package B, dependency C is built (but not re-added to the repo if it’s already there). Later, if you remove package A, it deletes its package archive and its AUR dependencies — but keeps package C, since package B still depends on it.

I could add a flag to re-enable the aurcache repo in the build container’s pacman.conf. That way, existing AUR dependencies wouldn’t need to be rebuilt if they’re already in the repo. It could reduce build times, but I’d probably need to parse out AUR dependencies from each PKGBUILD (or find another way to detect them) to make it work properly again.

Do you think that would be worth the effort?

-Lukas

[lordunsu]

Hi,

thanks for the quick response.

I would personally really think it be worth it. The package I was building here (qt5-webengine) in turn is a dependency for some other packages (e.g. teamviewer) so it gets build at least twice. Once, because I obviously want it cached as it is a install dependency for other packages and then as part of those. At least on my setup qt5-webengine takes ~2h to build (with 10 CPU cores) and uses > 16GB RAM...

So the rebuild adds quite a lot of overhead to the other packages.

[lordunsu]

Are you sure you need to filter anything?

I don't have, or know anything about, paru, but at least doing a quick test on my PC with makepkg:

I have qt5-webchannel installed locally and available via my custom aurcache-repo. But if I download it and do makepkg it still builds the package.

I mean I wouldn't expect aurcache to find all AUR dependencies and add those automatically to itself as tracked packages. Although that would in general be quite an amazing convenience feature ;). I would definitely consider that as being an independent enhancement from this "rebuild issue"

[Lukas-Heiligenbrunner]

Fair point.
Probably the best solution might giving the user a settings option to include the repo in the builder container.
This then creates a folder passtrough in the container and uses it as a local repo. This way we avoid networking errors where the container has not direct access to the main aurcache container.
I'll add a feature flag for this feature.

Auto-adding AUR dependencies: I'm not sure if this is a good idea as is. At least not in the main list at the dashboard table. I have 35 AUR package in my Dashboard at the moment and I think this would get pretty messy if there are also all its dependency listed. My idea is to improve the package info page to add more infos about the built dependencies and maybe a dependency graph or something. Or to make the table entries foldable, I have to think about it.