[arch-general] pacman has nothing to do last 5 days

[Maksim Fomin]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, December 8, 2019 12:06 AM, mick howe via arch-general <arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> For the last five days or so it reports nothing to do:-
>
> [mick at cave ~]$ pacman -Syyuu
> :: Synchronizing package databases...
> core 135.1 KiB 938 KiB/s 00:00 [######################]
> 100%
> extra 1647.8 KiB 2.68 MiB/s 00:01 [######################]
> 100%
> community 4.7 MiB 2.66 MiB/s 00:02 [######################]
> 100%
> multilib 164.2 KiB 2.97 MiB/s 00:00 [######################]
> 100%
> :: Starting full system upgrade...
> there is nothing to do
> [mick at cave ~]$
>
> This is the first time in around 10 years of running Arch this has
> happened, has some thing changed in pacman that I missed?

I have a similar issue, to be more preceise there are two issues here - "worldwide" servers are sometimes out of sync and pacman failure (seems so) to update when servers contain new packages. TL;dr the first issue is fixed by enabling alternative servers in mirrorlist, the second issue I could fixed by removing core/extra repository files in /var/lib/pacman/sync/.

1) After installing arch (some time ago) I enabled only "worldwide" servers. Approximately 1 year ago, there were cases when after 3-5 days pacman could not find any package updates (like the case above). After investigating this issue, it looks like "worldwide" servers were not synced: packages.archlinux.org returned, say firefox-67 while worldwide servers contained only firefox-66. This issue was fixed by enabling other repos in mirrorlist. As a consequence, pacman sometimes prints message like "error, could not download linux-5.4.1 from mirror xxxx" but downloads from another server and continues update.

2) The second issue is more strange. As in previous cases pacman prints "nothing to do", but this time servers (disclaimer: I checked only few of enabled) do contain new version of packages, so it looks like there is issue in pacman, not servers. In my case removing core.db and core.files at /var/lib/pacman/sync/ fixed the problem.

This issue in my case was revealed as partial updates leading to loading lib errors. It occurs pretty rarely, probably 1-2 times in 3 months and easy to fix. I didn't bother to document and file a bug.

P.S I checked that I have latest version of mirrorlist.