Endless yay / qtwebengine update... never ends

General system Pacman & AUR helpers
1

I use EndeavourOS on everything from a Chromebook to a Dell XPS 7590 w/ 64g of memory. And I love it. I’ve got it on at least five laptops overall. But now I have an issue on two of them and am intentionally avoiding updating on the others.

Below are two (oops, three) snaps of what happens when I run from Welcome “yay update Native and AUR packages” on these two machines. And just now, as I was typing this, I had it running on the other laptop and it crashed Welcome. This is after running for nearly half an hour! Obviously there’s a screw loose somewhere, metaphorically speaking.

Anyone have some clues for me? I’m afraid there’s a monster endlessly recurring set of repeatedly copied files somewhre on these machines, among other things. I’ve yet to have to do a wiipe/reinstall but am at the edge of considering that.

IMG20251115084444
IMG202511150844441920×860 412 KB

IMG20251115102155
IMG202511151021551920×860 596 KB

IMG20251115102441
IMG202511151024411920×860 478 KB

2

qt5-webengine relies on a good chunk of chromium’s source code. That is why it takes a lot of time to build.

Here is another user experiencing the same with qt5-webengine

3

You are building that AUR package from source and it is a huge amount to build.

Do you need it for anything or is it an old dependency you can remove?

4

You’re compiling qt5-webengine from the AUR, which takes a lot of resources.

It was included and required for Arch packages in the past, but demoted to the AUR recently, so you have to compile it yourself now. There’s a good chance you don’t need it anymore.

Do a yay -R qt5-webengine or paru -R qt5-webengine and see if something complains about its removal.

5

As far as I still keep finding our, lots of QT5 staff has gone into AUR. What I do, is running yay -Rc {qt5-something}.

So, if there are no complaints/warnings, yay -Rc <package> removes the specified package(s) and simultaneously cleans up their cached build files, freeing disk space.

6

As far as I still keep finding our, lots of QT5 staff has gone into AUR. What I do, is running yay -Rc {qt5-something}.

So, if there are no complaints/warnings, yay -Rc <package> removes the specified package(s) and simultaneously cleans up their cached build files, freeing disk space.

7

Check if you actually need (“Required By“)qt5-webenginewith

pacman -Qi qt5-webengine

For the time being you could install a pre-built-package (at your own risk). Check the AUR package page which contains info and a link to a pre-build.

Install with …

sudo pacman -U <package.pkg.tar.zst>

8

Do you have zoom client installed on the laptop?
If yes, please look at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zoom#comment-1047026 and other comments. qt5-webengine (and qt5-webchannel) is/are no longer dependencies of zoom but only optdepends. I managed to solve it by uninstalling zoom, qt5-webengine and qt5-webchannel and the reinstall zoom.

9

Thank you to everyone who contributed comments here. I’m not yet to the point of sorting this out, but will likely take your collective adivce and get the probably unnecessary file(s) off via uninstall.