Alright, let me tell you about this thing I tried out today – kinda wild, kinda worked, kinda didn’t. I was messing around with some Arch Linux stuff, right? Aiming for that ‘perfect’ setup, the one where everything just…clicks.
It started simple enough. I was trying to get this specific AUR package to build. You know, the usual dance: git clone, makepkg -si. But this time, it threw a fit. Dependencies, man. Always the dependencies.
I spent like an hour just chasing down missing libraries. Installed this, removed that, linked this other thing… felt like I was untangling spaghetti with a fork. And every time I thought I’d nailed it, BAM! Another error message. Different error, same pain.
Okay, fine, I thought. Let’s try something a bit more hardcore. I dove into the PKGBUILD file itself. Messed with the depends=() array, added some extra build flags… things I barely understood, to be honest. Copied stuff from Stack Overflow, crossed my fingers, and hit makepkg again.
This time, it actually got further! I was feeling like a genius. But then… BOOM. Compiler errors. Pages and pages of them. Looked like Greek to me. I tried googling some of the error snippets, but the solutions were all for different packages, different versions, different everything.
- First, I tried the dependencies.
- Second, I edited the PKGBUILD file.
- Third, I tried to fix the compiler errors.
I was about to give up, completely defeated. But then I remembered something I read in the Arch Wiki about chroots. Figured, what the heck, might as well try it.
So I set up a clean chroot environment, nice and isolated. Inside that chroot, I installed the base-devel group and all the dependencies I thought I needed. Then, I tried building the package again, inside the chroot.
And… you know what? It almost worked. Got further than ever before. Still had a linking error, but this time it was actually a different linking error. Progress!
I tweaked the PKGBUILD one last time, added a specific library path to the linker flags. Hit makepkg. And…it built! Holy crap, it actually built. I had a package. A real, installable package.
Installed it, ran the program… and it crashed. Fantastic. But hey, at least I learned a lot about Arch packaging, chroots, and the depths of despair. Maybe tomorrow I’ll figure out why it’s crashing. Or maybe I’ll just go back to using the program that actually works. Jury’s still out on that one.
So, did I do right?
Honestly? Probably not the right way. There were probably a dozen easier ways to do this. But I got it working (sort of), and I learned a ton in the process. And that’s what really matters, right? Right?
