[arch-general] Segmentation fault and (likely) file system bug while removing gnome-extra

[Robert W0ng]

Hi, All.

For several reasons I decided to remove the group 'gnome-extra'
from my system. During the uninstallation, something went wrong.

For a 'funny' reason, which I may explain later, I wasn't able
to post the error log in the form of text here, so I will upload
a photo as an attachment[1] with this mail...

So, I switched to a getty and started the uninstallation. No
errors occourred until it reached the 15th package. The package
name was 'telepathy-idle'. All of a sudden the system printed
a large section of dmesg, saying something like it had run into
a kernel bug(?). The pacman was then killed, leaving the zsh
reporting a segmentation fault...

I felt the possibility that I wasn't able to handle this problem
on my own, so I took a photograph using my mobile without even
thinking, which proved to be useful later. Then I ran 

# dmesg >> /root/dmesg.output

hoping to save the error log. I tried to restart the
uninstallation, but the pacman freezed. Even pressing CTRL-C
didn't work. I switched to another getty attemptting to terminal
in, but after I entered 'root' and pressed ENTER, no any output.
The course was just left there, blinking. Having no choice, I
reboot the system using the magic sysrq keys...

Rebooted, I checked the package changes. Confusingly, no packages
was removed, even the previous should-be-removed 15 ones! Bad
feeling about this, I checked the /root directory, and here came
the most confusing part: The dmesg.output file was GONE! It
seemed that all the data that should have been written to the
disk were discarded...

(And that's the reason why I have to post the error log in the
 form of shooted image... Somehow, I found myself a potential
 prophet... :P JUST KID...)

Judged by this, together with the previous error log, I would
say it's a file system bug... But, confused, how can an
uninstallation of packages end up like this way? :(

I would appreciate any help from you guys. Truly would. Thank
you in advance! :)

PS: I'm not going to post my pacman.conf here because all
    modification I had ever done to this file was to enable the
    color output. I suppose it can be excluded from the possible
    causes... And if necessary, I would recur the
    uninstallation with '--debug' flag enabled and report
    it to the upstream developer...

[1] Upadte: Unable to upload the image file because it's too
            big to be attached in this mailing list... So I
            uploaded it to a local website and I will post the
            image address here.

Image Address: http://imgsrc.baidu.com/forum/pic/item/7bf9f2c4b74543a9b
9da16cf14178a82bb0114d4.jpg


RW