On 11/8/18 12:25 PM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi Eli,
Not in my case as I've previously done a `pacman -Syuw' during `free bandwidth' hours, thanks to cron. Later on, when I'm at the keyboard and it's a convenient time for breakage, I upgrade to what's already been downloaded manually and definitely don't want `-y'. :-)
That's dangerous because you could forget and run pacman -S pkgname.
AIUI, if I did then the version of pkgname it would try to download to install would be that snap-shotted when cron ran `pacman -Syuw'. And that's a problem because that version might not be available for download any more if a later one has been made available? Similarly, with packages pkgname depends on. Is there another problem I don't know?
-_- No, the problem is that you'll accidentally do a partial update. The package itself might very well be cached already, but if not, you'll get a 404 "cannot find package, I will now error without doing anything". That's not "dangerous". Dangerous is when you break your system by installing incompatible packages via a "successful" partial update.
I actually tend to: sudo -i at 1:23 <<<'pacman -Syw pkgname' as it's normally not urgent.
Can an attempt to fetch an old, now missing, package still occur even with `pacman -Sy pkgname' because the remote database has been altered, and old versions removed, between the -y's refresh and fetching a long list of packages?
It won't be old and now missing, because you used -Sy and it will refresh *again*. But if you don't use -y, then trying to install a package first looks in the cache, where it may not need to be fetched... -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User