[arch-general] In defense of pacman.static

[Piyush P Kurur]

Hi,

	This is my first posting on Arch-general. I am one
of the recent converts to the Arch religion from the Debian 
religion.

I am writing this in defense of the pacman.static package from
archlinuxfr site. I have been running for Arch on a server, a 
laptop and an eeepc box for a while. The server and laptop
were updated almost regularly may be once every 3 days where as
the eeepc was not upgraded for about 2 months.

So I hit pacman -Syu on eeepc and it first asked to install the
new pacman version. I went ahead and then with the new pacman
I had a problem. It would just not run as a shared library 
was missing. I was stuck. One way was to reinstall the thing
again, I hate this. The other solution which I now describe
might be known but still it might be interesting if you get
stuck in a similar situation.

Imagin that you are install Arch linux sitting in another
distro. You would have started with installing the pacman.static
package first and then syncing the packages into the directory
which will be your new arch root.

Something like

$ mount /dev/sda2 /media/target
$ # copy the mirror list and pacman.conf in the appropriate place
$ pacman.static --root /media/target -Sy base


Now that you are already in Arch all you have to do is the last line.
In my case I just had to install the xz-utils package absense of which
was creating the problem.

$ pacman.static -S xz-utils 

The pacman upgrade some how did not install this package. I guess this
is a bug. After that the pacman started working fine and I did the
following

$ pacman -Syu 


Note. This might be a problem with my pacman.conf. I probably had to
install things in the right order. 


Regards

ppk