[pacman-dev] Pacman 3.0.5-3: strange behaviour

[Dan McGee]

On 8/17/07, Giovanni Scafora <linuxmania at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I noticed that new pacman release doesn't ever show the message "is up
> to date" when I run pacman -Sy (or -Syu).
> Pacman thinks there are always new dbs.

Hmm, I see this behavior as well. I'm not sure what in the patch I
applied would cause this, as we never touch any of the sync db
download code:
http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/base/pacman/pacman-cumulative.patch?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

3.0.5-2 already included the removal of the chmod lines, so that can
be ruled out. The other code in add.c shouldn't affect DB downloads at
all, so that can be eliminated as well.

That leaves two possibilities: the large file support, or the config
file parsing. I would tend to think the latter shouldn't affect this
issue, so perhaps large file support is buggy?

If anyone wants to trial it by rebuilding and installing without large
file support (use the --disable-largefile flag to ./configure), it
might help us get to the bottom of this issue.

AC_SYS_LARGEFILE documentation:
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.57/html_node/autoconf_67.html#IDX556

EDIT: I did the above and rebuilt without large file support, and it
did in fact fix this issue. Very interesting. The root of it looks to
be with the .lastupdate files:

with largefile support disabled:
$ cat /var/lib/pacman/current/.lastupdate
20070817163345

with largefile support enabled:
$ cat /var/lib/pacman/current/.lastupdate
19350919013712

Clearly something wrong in the second case. Time to do some digging.

-Dan