[arch-dev-public] heads up: /lib removal

[Jan de Groot]

On za, 2012-07-07 at 13:25 -0400, Dave Reisner wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> Allan pushed glib 2.16-2 into [testing] which removes /lib as a
> directory, replacing it with a symlink. A bit of advice...
> 
> - In the simplest case, the upgrade can be done as simply as:
> 
>     pacman -Syu --ignore glibc && pacman -S glibc
> 
> - Since nothing is ever simple, if the above still fails on installation
>   of glibc (with a somewhat cryptic "/lib exists" error), you'll need to
>   figure out what's still in /lib that doesn't belong to glibc.
>   Generally this will end up being modules/. pacman -Qo /lib/* will
>   pinpoint what needs fixing/removing. Deal with anything that isn't
>   owned explicitly by glibc and complete the installation.
> 
> It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll mention it anyways:
> 
> Do. Not. Use. (the) --force. Obi-wan approves of this.

I didn't need --force to fuck up my system. When I upgraded like above,
I got file conflicts because of some depmod files in /lib/modules,
combined with an old ancient udev-compat package. I removed udev-compat
and the files, but there were still some empty directories in /lib.
When running pacman -S glibc, pacman didn't detect any file conflicts,
installed the new glibc, told me that it could not extract /lib and then
left my system in a state that couldn't execute a single command
anymore.