Hi, 2009/7/13 David Rosenstrauch

I.e., sounds like you've got some compatibility issues with packages in testing.

I had the same problem after installing firefox without updating the whole system. Only core, extra, community in use - no testing... This looks like a bug to me. It might not be correct of me to not update the whole system, but making the system completely unbootable by just updating a webbrowser looks something that should be the prerogative of MS Windows :p Vincent

On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:18:47 +0200 bardo wrote:

2009/7/14 Vincent Van Houtte :

...

I had the same problem after installing firefox without updating the whole system. Only core, extra, community in use - no testing...

Your mirror probably synced while the move was in progress, this is called bad luck ;) Anyway, selective upgrades are known to break the system, and this has been underlined recently, specifically related to this move. Corrado

Don't our scripts handle this by doing atomic moves? (eg first fix everything in a separate directory, then move directory over old one) Dieter

bardo wrote:

2009/7/14 Vincent Van Houtte :

...

I had the same problem after installing firefox without updating the whole system. Only core, extra, community in use - no testing...

Your mirror probably synced while the move was in progress, this is called bad luck ;) Anyway, selective upgrades are known to break the system, and this has been underlined recently, specifically related to this move.

Nope - he went "pacman -Sy firefox" which pulled in new libraries (due to versioned deps) but did not pull in all the other packages that were needed. "pacman -Syu" is the only good way to do a "pacman -Sy"... Allan

2009/7/14 Vincent Van Houtte :

Again, I know I have to keep my Archlinux-systems up to date, but I didn't have the time to completely update that particular pc, still wanting to update firefox since my grandfather *only* uses firefox on his computer. I just didn't know pacman didn't handle all dependencies for me and I thought upgrading a simple webbrowser would be safe.

Firefox "a simple webbrowser"? You're joking, I hope... it's one of the most complex web browsers available for linux! Just because I don't know about Opera enough to exclude it... Abput versioning dependencies, you're right, but it can't be always done. You can tie a package to a specific version of a dependency, but then when you update that dependency you also have to update the package; this is really inefficient. Otherwise, you can use the '>=' operator. Then the dependency's ABI could change, triggering a recompilation of the app requiring it, but the package manager would never know. This is what's happening now with libreadline and libjpeg. There's no automated way of handling every case. Corrado

2009/7/14 Vincent Van Houtte :

2009/7/14 bardo

...

Firefox "a simple webbrowser"? You're joking, I hope...

I was pointing at the discussion some years ago between MS and the EC that Internet Explorer could not be removed from the operating system :)

I didn't get this one, sorry =)

I also didn't want to come here just to whine my system has to be fixed because of this, but only because someone in this thread said the problem was caused by combining the testing and other repo's. But I don't recall any warning that pacman in some (rare) cases doesn't handle all dependencies...

Well... there's no perfect solution, as I said. Proper dependency versioning really takes a lot of time, and is often hard to do if not specified by upstream developers, so a full -Syu has always been suggested. Also, the beginner's guide clearly states to fix things once in a while, because they tend to break ;-) Anyway, I wasn't attacking you, I hope it's clear :)