On 6/7/20 9:09 PM, Greg Minshall wrote: > hi. a month ago i ran out of room on my root file system, so relocated > /var/cache/pacman to /home, and left behind a symlink. > > today, after a while, i did a 'pacman -Syu', which downloaded lots, and > ran through a lot new keys, upgrading, etc., then failed (see below), > and (the symbolic link at) /var/cache/pacman seems to have disappeared. > > any suggestions on how i might recover? (and, should i, possibly, > rather than using a symlink, have modified, e.g., /etc/pacman.conf?) Your post-disaster analysis is correct. You should have modified pacman.conf. You're the most recent person to discover https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50298 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58804 (To be clear, pacman "should" learn to fatally abort with "error: you're not allowed to replace a packaged directory with a symlink", and refuse to let you pacman -Syu until you put things back where they belong. Instead, it gets mid transaction, then as part of uninstalling the old version of pacman it tries to delete /var/cache/pacman/pkg and *doesn't* skip it since it is not a directory. Boom. Your symlink is uninstalled, along with the old version of /usr/bin/pacman and everything else, and then it cannot find the new package anymore to get the replacements.) > i have all the files still in /home/pacman/pkg, etc. (and have put back > the symlink). In that case, reinstalling pacman is an adequate recovery method, though as the disaster manifested by wiping pacman from your system, you'll need to extract the *.pkg.tar.zst using bsdtar, or use the static recovery binaries listed here: https://www.archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression/ (Or use the installation media.) -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User
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