keithzg on Nostr: Very amused by the travails of an Arch-using friend of mine lately > mount the disk ...
Very amused by the travails of an Arch-using friend of mine lately
> mount the disk and chroot in to figure out what's wrong and lo and behold, while pacman lists vmlinux as one of the files owned by the linux package, there is no vmlinux i guess when pacman was upgrading linux it just forgot to install the linux so i try to reinstal the package and this time it actually manages to include the fucking kernel but when it tries to build the initramfs some glibc function segfaults
> So I think I've mentioned before how arch, by default, doesn't delete any cached versions of old packages in case you ever have to downgrade a package because the servers don't keep old versions of packages. So on the one hand, that caused pacman to abort partway through a system upgrade since I ran out of disk space, and pacman apparently did *not* install any of the packages it had processed when this happened, but *did* mark those packages as having been installed anyway, so when I deleted the oldest layers of the package cache and tried again, it just left those packages uninstalled and with files missing (I think specifically it never processed the post-transaction hooks for those packages?) so that's how I ended up in a state where pacman was saying that everything's fully upgraded and up to date :) despite literally not having a kernel. But, on the other hand, having old package caches did considerably speed up the process of reinstalling 1773 packages
> And yes, this is a common enough problem to have section on the archwiki on how to fix it
> mount the disk and chroot in to figure out what's wrong and lo and behold, while pacman lists vmlinux as one of the files owned by the linux package, there is no vmlinux i guess when pacman was upgrading linux it just forgot to install the linux so i try to reinstal the package and this time it actually manages to include the fucking kernel but when it tries to build the initramfs some glibc function segfaults
> So I think I've mentioned before how arch, by default, doesn't delete any cached versions of old packages in case you ever have to downgrade a package because the servers don't keep old versions of packages. So on the one hand, that caused pacman to abort partway through a system upgrade since I ran out of disk space, and pacman apparently did *not* install any of the packages it had processed when this happened, but *did* mark those packages as having been installed anyway, so when I deleted the oldest layers of the package cache and tried again, it just left those packages uninstalled and with files missing (I think specifically it never processed the post-transaction hooks for those packages?) so that's how I ended up in a state where pacman was saying that everything's fully upgraded and up to date :) despite literally not having a kernel. But, on the other hand, having old package caches did considerably speed up the process of reinstalling 1773 packages
> And yes, this is a common enough problem to have section on the archwiki on how to fix it