Hey there,

First, I’d like to thank all the people working on CachyOS. It feels great—like the “new Ubuntu” back in 2005.

Installation is usually very fast thanks to pre-compiled packages. But recently, I installed Citrix Workspace (paru -Syu icaclient) and ended up with over four hours of compiling time at 100% CPU usage.

For this program, there seems to be a Flatpak available, which would shorten the installation time drastically. It would be great to get a hint before entering a multi-hour compilation session.

Nevertheless, I had a similar problem when I needed to compile a custom kernel due to a regression.

Is there any chance to get a time estimation before compilation starts?

Hello and welcome,

So used a foreign build script to manually compile the software from source.

Well, yeah, but it is not the same thing.
Its not just pre-compiled .. it is a flatpak, which is containerized - requiring the flatpak framework, its own flatpak dependencies, and other considerations.

The hint is that you applied a command which does certain things, using an AUR-helper, and then were presented with exactly what was going to happen (PKGBUILD is shown by paru by default) to which you accepted everything.
Though this does not specifically include output of an estimated build time.

I do not know if such a thing would be at all possible.
Certainly not without at least downloading the sources and such first - considering these build scripts are for foreign things so the software could be anything held anywhere.
Or some kind of of huge database of how big each AUR package is after having built it? It cannot be simply an index of static times because each build environment is different with different resources.
In any case as of now it is not part of any existing tool that I know of.