D. R. Evans [2012.07.20 0827 -0600]:
Norbert Zeh said the following at 07/19/2012 06:08 PM :
Well, the filesystem instructions are older and applied at the time the glibc upgrade was not an issue yet. Combining the two instructions, I would guess the following should work:
pacman -Syu --ignore filesystem --ignore glibc pacman -S --force filesystem --ignore glibc pacman -Sd <everything you couldn't upgrade due to ignored glibc>
Incidentally, this is quite a long list. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:usrlib seems to suggest that the list will contain only a few items, but the actual number is of the order a couple of dozen packages.
pacman -Su
Note that I did not try this, but it seems to be the logical combination of the two. Maybe one of the developers can chime in and confirm that this is the right strategy.
I am rather reticent to try something untested, especially when I see the --force option in use. So yes, PLEASE, can a developer address this issue so that I can have more confidence that I won't end up with a hosed system.
(I am very puzzled as to why this is happening at all. This is not a system to which anything fancy has ever been done. If I'm having this problem, I don't know why lots of others aren't seeing it too.)
I got a fairly long list of packages I had to ignore in the first run, too, and I had a few unowned files in /lib I had to clean out. It all worked very well following the instructions on the wiki, though. So no complaints at all. I think the reason why you are having a much more serious issue is that it seems you haven't updated your system in a long time. So now you're running into dealing with two slightly tricky upgrades (filesystem + glibc) at the same time. I upgrade packages very frequently. So I dealt with the filesystem upgrade a few weeks ago, and all went smoothly. Having an up-to-date filesystem package, the upgrade of glibc was also fairly straightforward, even if it involved quite a bit of manual intervention. I think the lesson to be learned here is that not upgrading packages on an arch box for a long time is not the best idea, and I think most arch users do upgrade quite frequently. Cheers, Norbert