[arch-general] broken system after today upgrade

[arnaud gaboury]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Dennis Herbrich <dennis at archlinux.org>wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 10:21:12AM +0100, arnaud gaboury wrote:
> > I was thereafter happy to log into my system, with no kernel panic !
> > I decided to reinstall all packages from the "broken" upgrade.
> >
> > Nevertheless, everything is not fine. Somme apps are broken, and do not
> > know why. I guess it is because of the /usr/lib64 issue.
> > For example, offlineimap and log are broken with no reasons, as they used
> > to work perfectly.
>
> Hello Arnaud.
>
> When you system is thought to be inconsistent, the recommended course of
> action
> is to bring it back into a well-known state. Yeah, I know, stating the
> obvious.
>
> A consistent state can be reached by reinstalling, of course, but we do not
> want to take this option. ;)
>
> Alternatively, consistency really boils down to "1) all files that are
> supposed to
> be installed must be installed, and 2) nothing should be installed that is
> not
> either part of one of the installed packages, or willfully and correctly
> installed manually by the admin."
>
> To check both, some pacman and scripting magic makes life easier:
>
> 1)
> pacman -Qk should have checked that already. A "historic" alternative was
> to
> simply explicitly reinstall all currently installed packages. Get a list
> of all
> packages with pacman -Q, munge the output, and use pacman -S to install
> each
> package again, with it's version explicitly given as "<pkgname>=<pkgver>"
> to
> pacman.
>
> 2)
> All files that SHOULD be installed (through package management) can be
> listed
> by pacman -Ql|cut -d' ' -f2. Pipe this (sorted) to a file, and you've got
> your
> list to check against. Then run find on /, excluding directories like
> /home,
> /dev, /proc and /sys, and diff/comm both results to get an idea if there
> may be
> extra files on your disk where they shouldn't be. Honorable mention goes to
> rogue or missing libraries in /usr/lib, which may cause all kinds of
> annoying
> failures. The 'comm' tool is especially useful here.
>
> At the very least you should recursively check /bin, /boot, /opt, /sbin,
> /usr
> and /var for stray files, with /etc coming next. Be aware that /opt and
> /etc
> may very well include "stray files" that are supposed to be there. That's
> really something you must know and decide for yourself, though.
>
> Did I mention that pacman is awesome? Combined with the Arch Rollback
> Machine,
> it's insanely powerful and flexible. :)
>
> Good luck!
>   Dennis
> --
> "Den Rechtsstaat macht aus, dass Unschuldige wieder frei kommen."
>   Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, Bundesinnenminister (14.10.08, TAZ-Interview)
>
> 0D21BE6C - F3DC D064 BB88 5162 56BE  730F 5471 3881 0D21 BE6C
>


Dennis,

thank you so much for your full and detailed explanations.

I totally agree it is a very bad idea to let a system in an inconsistent
state. It will certainly lead to huge problems in the future.

Here is what I did :

-1 #pacman -Qk -----> no missing files
-2-#pacman -Qq | grep -vxFf <(pacman -Qqm) | sudo pacman -S  ----->
reinstall ALL packages excepted AUR
-3-  #pacman -U each AUR one by one (ouf !!)
-4 run this script found in the wiki:
#!/bin/sh

tmp=${TMPDIR-/tmp}/pacman-disowned-$UID-$$
db=$tmp/db
fs=$tmp/fs

mkdir "$tmp"
trap 'rm -rf "$tmp"' EXIT

pacman -Qlq | sort -u > "$db"

find /bin /etc /lib /sbin /usr \
  ! -name lost+found \
  \( -type d -printf '%p/\n' -o -print \) | sort > "$fs"

comm -23 "$fs" "$db"

$ pacman-disdowned > non-db.txt

Then carefully rm OR rename when in doubt all uneeded files.

My system is working not bad, but still two obvious issues:
-log files do not log anymore. Maybe not so important as $journalctl seems
our new friend.
-I use offlineimap + msmtp + mutt on a gmail accound.
[gabx at magnolia:~]$ offlineimap
OfflineIMAP 6.5.4
  Licensed under the GNU GPL v2+ (v2 or any later version)
Account sync Gmail:
 *** Processing account Gmail
 Establishing connection to imap.gmail.com:993
 Creating new Local Status db for Gmail_local:INBOX-journal
 ERROR: While attempting to sync account 'Gmail'
  file is encrypted or is not a database
 *** Finished account 'Gmail' in 0:01
ERROR: Exceptions occurred during the run!
ERROR: While attempting to sync account 'Gmail'
  file is encrypted or is not a database

I do not understand what has changed about my ~/Mail/gmail database. Is it
on my side, or gmail side? I will investigate deeper.

NOW next step is to buy a new HD, install a fresh Archlinux without testing
and dual boot. My box has changed from the "to hobby" status to "working
tool" due to a radical change in my job (from trader to developper !). I
can not any more afford break, as a lot of Java dev and a big website are
ahead.

Thank you again for your support. Once more, the open source model proved
to be efficient.