No way to build this without dnf already installed

[theosib-amazon]

In much the same way that a dictionary definition of a word should not rely on that word in the definition, a software package should not rely on itself to be built.

I have a package I want to install (sbt) that can't be installed with either an older version of itself or dnf already installed. But on Amazon Linux, we don't have dnf. So I decided to install dnf from source. But it relies on dnf to install its dependencies!

Well, I installed those manually but then discovered that this dnf relies on libdnf (although it doesn't tell you that when building). So I decided to build libdnf from source and found that it too relies on dnf already being installed to fetch the dependencies.

There are so many dependencies that it's very difficult to track down the names you need to use for yum. Even so, even if the dependencies are installed, it still can't find them. For instance, I already have "gpgme" installed, but when I try to build it tells me, "No usable gpgme flavours found."

[kontura]

Well, I installed those manually but then discovered that this dnf relies on libdnf (although it doesn't tell you that when building).

Yes we do have problems with the dependency relationships in cmake, it is because we basically don't use them. Instead we use the spec files so libdnf.spec or dnf.spec, these have all the dependencies specified and their versions. For rpm based distributions you can get the names of the packages from there.

For instance, I already have "gpgme" installed, but when I try to build it tells me, "No usable gpgme flavours found."

I am guessing you need the devel package. On fedora this is gpgme-devel.

In general neither dnf nor libdnf require dnf to be build but they obviously do require their dependencies and it just so happens that the easiest way to install those is with dnf builddep.
It is difficult to get them manually without dnf because that is one of the problems dnf is solving.

Apart from maintaining lists of dependencies for every linux distribution (which doesn't seem feasible), do you have any suggestions have we could make this easier?