Add a makedepends installer(?)

For developers working on Alpine-based systems, there currently seems to be no easy way to install the makedepends for a package (see also this pmOS issue). Given a package name you have to manually locate and download the APKBUILD and then use abuild to install the makedepends.

We have considered the possibility of adding the makedepends to packages themselves, similar to how (run)depends are contained in .PKGINFO, but this would create additional bloat in all packages for a rare use case (see also here).

Instead we have decided to create a minimal shell script that automates the process. Given a package name, it determines the repository name, fetches the APKBUILD from this git repository here and then runs abuild to install the makedepends. For packages that are only contained in pmaports, the script creates and caches a shallow clone of the pmaports git repository and retrieves the APKBUILD from there. The script is currently being reviewed here.

We were wondering if there would be any interest at all in having this tool as a separate package in aports itself?

The fact that it contains a pmOS-specific part might technically disqualify it for aports but since we act based on the repository URL, we believe it shouldn't create any issues on other Alpine-based systems and could also easily be expanded to support their own package repositories as well.