Are Soar Packages self bootstrapable?

[Kreijstal]

Can I make a soar package using only soar packages? aka gcc, autoconf toolchain, or rust compiler, binutils.

[Azathothas]

It depends on each package.
For simple ones, where we simply fetch a prebuilt from upstream, we only need curl + jq, which are easy since we have build_util as part of the spec
Some examples of this include:

• https://github.com/pkgforge/soarpkgs/blob/main/packages/86box/appimage.official.stable.yaml#L9
• https://github.com/pkgforge/soarpkgs/blob/main/packages/actual/appimage.official.stable.yaml#L8

But anything that requires more dependencies (other than simple statically linked tools), we just use docker to do it.
Almost all of our static binaries have this note:

note:
  - "[DO NOT RUN] (Meant for pkgforge CI Only)"

We were going to add sbuild utilities into soar itself, but decided to postpone it as we didn't want users creating issues if some package fails to build on their system because they didn't have the needed dependencies.

To answer your question:
Mostly no.
We had rather avoid what homebrew does & keep it simple.
As such, make only the maintainers bear the burden of building anything & for users, provide all our packages prebuilt.
This will likely remain to be the case until soar is more mature & we have more maintainers willing to work on this.