[arch-general] No login after update

[Yaro Kasear]

On 8/19/20 2:13 PM, Giancarlo Razzolini via arch-general wrote:
> Em agosto 19, 2020 16:02 Manuel Reimer escreveu:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Some minutes ago I did a regular system update and after that decided
>> to reboot. After reboot I was unable to log into my system. After
>> fiddling a bit I rebooted to an Arch boot stick to find the following
>> message in pacman.log:
>>
>> [2020-08-19T20:42:55+0200] [ALPM] warning: /etc/pam.d/system-login
>> installed as
>> /etc/pam.d/system-login.pacnew
>>
>
> The .pacnew should've been handled *before* rebooting.
>
>> As this seemed to be a candidate that may cause login problems, I
>> deleted "system-login" and moved the ".pacnew" into place.
>>
>> After reboot I'm now able to log in again...
>>
>> IMHO something like this should not happen...
>>
>> Maybe it's worth a note on the Arch homepage that it is important to
>> move this pacnew into place before reboot?
>>
>
> This only affected you and whomever else changed system-login. It's
> not news
> material. Also, if you're messing with PAM, you should be responsible
> for applying
> the new stuff, otherwise it'll break, like it did for you.
>
> Regards,
> Giancarlo Razzolini

I've always questioned the wisdom of dropping a .pacnew just when the
file is different from the default. There's really no reason for it
considering any changes you made were deliberate and presumably thought
out. The end result is pacman cluttering /etc with a default
configuration file whose only reason for existing is to, if it's used,
clear settings. Why?

What pacman SHOULD do is compare /etc files between package versions and
see if there's a change BETWEEN DEFAULTS. *Then* there's an actual
reason to need a new default config file for the user to examine because
then there's an actual indicator some meaningful change in default
configuration or how the package handles configs happened.

All most pacnew files wind up doing is sitting there for thirty seconds
before being deleted without anyone even opening them because they're
literally just what the file was before the user ALREADY changed it
before... because it's utterly useless to get a default config file when
you've intentionally changed it and there's nothing in the new version
of the package that calls for an examination of the defaults.

Yaro


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