[arch-general] glibc issues during first update in several months

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 10/02/2012 01:30 AM, Erik Johnson wrote:
> After several months of not updating my home server, I decided to run
> updates tonight. I still hadn't done the /usr/lib symlink move, so I
> followed the guide on the wiki like I did for my other boxes and still
> ended up borking my system. Think this is because I accidentally said "yes"
> to upgrading pacman before the other packages. I ended up finding this
> thread on the forum:
>
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1167283
>
> After booting with a rescue disc and untar-ing the package into my root
> partition as that thread suggested, I was able to get booted back up and
> continue with the upgrade.

I recently ran into similar issues resulting from my taking care of this 
upgrade much later than when it was released.

FYI, though, for future reference:  there's an alternative (and an 
arguably more "correct" one) to untar-ing a package into your root 
directory to fix issues like this.  If you boot into an Arch Linux 
installation disk, you can then use the copy of pacman installed on that 
disk to "properly" install packages onto your hard disk.  You just have 
to use the "-r" (change root) parm of pacman to do it.  So for example, 
you can do things like this (e.g., if the root file system of your hard 
disk is mounted at /mnt/temp):

$ pacman -r /mnt/temp -U 
/mnt/temp/var/cache/pacman/pkg/<some-package>.pkg.xz

Doing things this way will make sure that the pacman database on your 
hard disk gets updated correctly when you install the packages to fix 
the breakage.

HTH,

DR