[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Give informative error message when the to-be-downloaded file cannot be created

[Nagy Gabor]

It can happen that the to-be-downloaded file cannot be created in cachedir.
For example, I am an -Sup user, and it is comfortable to set --cachedir to
/mnt/pendrive, which is a FAT filesystem, so files like
capseo-1:0.3-2-i686.pkg.tar.xz cannot be downloaded to there.

Before this patch, pacman didn't give clear output about what happens when
the download code could not create the necessary file. This can be confusing
with -Su. An example output:
***
$ sudo pacman -S capseo bochs --cachedir /c/TEMP

resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...

Targets (2): bochs-2.4.6-1  capseo-1:0.3-2

Total Download Size:    0.61 MiB
Total Installed Size:   2.61 MiB

Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
:: Retrieving packages from extra...
warning: failed to retrieve some files from extra
 bochs-2.4.6-1-i686       611.5 KiB   118K/s 00:05 [------------------]  97%
error: failed to commit transaction (unexpected error)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
***

After the patch, pacman will give more informative error message (and
pm_errno is set properly):
***
error: failed to create file '/c/TEMP/capseo-1:0.3-2-i686.pkg.tar.xz.part' for download
error: failed to commit transaction (failed to retrieve some files)
***

Unfortunately, the "failed to create file" error message is printed for
every mirror (that can be dozens of lines), which is ugly, but at least
informative... Without modifying the download logic (for example, by
introducing -2 return value for _alpm_download() to indicate giving up),
this ugliness cannot be eliminated.

Signed-off-by: Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu>
---
 lib/libalpm/dload.c |    3 +++
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/libalpm/dload.c b/lib/libalpm/dload.c
index 97778c2..9b57b97 100644
--- a/lib/libalpm/dload.c
+++ b/lib/libalpm/dload.c
@@ -422,6 +422,9 @@ static int curl_download_internal(struct dload_payload *payload,
 	if(localf == NULL) {
 		localf = fopen(payload->tempfile_name, payload->tempfile_openmode);
 		if(localf == NULL) {
+			handle->pm_errno = ALPM_ERR_RETRIEVE;
+			_alpm_log(handle, ALPM_LOG_ERROR,
+					_("failed to create file '%s' for download\n"), payload->tempfile_name);
 			goto cleanup;
 		}
 	}
-- 
1.7.9