[arch-general] [aur-general]WIKI/pacman -Sy

[Arno Gaboury]

On 06/27/2012 04:04 PM, Dennis Herbrich wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 03:56:25PM +0200, Arno Gaboury wrote:
>> On the *pacman WIKI*, there is a useful Warning:
>> **When installing packages, do *not* refresh the package list
>> without upgrading
>> <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Upgrading_packages> the
>> system (i.e. |pacman -Sy /package_name/|); this can lead to
>> dependency issues.
>>
>> But on most WIKI, when installing a new package is needed, I always
>> find this command:
>>
>> *$pacman -S packagenam*
>>
>> As by definition WIKI will often adress to newbies, my thought was
>> to replace whenever I find the above command by this following one:
>>
>> *$pacman -Sy packagenam*
> This is exactly what is advised against!
>
> Rule of thumb:
> DO NOT run "pacman -Sy <packages>", ever.
> DO run "pacman -Syu ; pacman -S <packages>" instead,
> if you want to have the latest and greatest <packages>.
>
> pacman -Sy only updates your repository database, but NOT the packages on your
> system. That way you will be presented with the *current* version of
> <packages>, not those versions which would be correct for the state of your
> system.
> By just using pacman -S, you do NOT touch the repository database, so
> you'll be getting potentially "old" packages that DO fit the rest of your
> system, but you might experience the issue that the remote mirror does not
> offer the old version anymore for download.
> THEN you should upgrade the whole system and your repo database before
> installing the package you want (-Syu), or download the missing package from
> the the arch rollback machine and keep the "old" repo db.
>
> HTH,
>    Dennis
>
Ah, my poor english let me to misunderstand the Warning. Sorry about that.
Btw, I always run pacman -Syu.

So let the WIKI with pacman -S and forgive me for my stupid idea.