[RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

Leonid.I · 2011-03-01 04:38:59

I started to ask this question after noticing that on a fresh arch64 install, I can't mount usb, because /media does not exist. This directory belongs to core/filesystem. After running pacman -Qk, it also turned out that extra/hicolor-icon-theme lacks some empty dirs:

~> pacman -Qk hicolor-icon-theme
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/devices/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/actions/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/actions/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/actions/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/actions/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/actions/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/status/ (No such file or directory)
hicolor-icon-theme: 343 total files, 11 missing file(s)

Finally, on another machine:

~> pacman -Qk hicolor-icon-theme
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/devices/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/devices/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/status/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/categories/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/devices/ (No such file or directory)
warning: hicolor-icon-theme: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/status/ (No such file or directory)
hicolor-icon-theme: 343 total files, 16 missing file(s)

and:

~> pacman -Qk ca-certificates
warning: ca-certificates: /etc/ca-certificates/ (No such file or directory)
warning: ca-certificates: /etc/ca-certificates/update.d/ (No such file or directory)
ca-certificates: 163 total files, 2 missing file(s)

Notice, that the two sets of missing dirs in hicolor-icon-theme are different between two installations. The problem is that on the first installation ca-certificates is OK So, it appears that pacman randomly ignores empty directories in packages.

There was a timely thread at pacman-dev (http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/ … 12554.html), where a similar issue was reported, but without any conclusion...

Any ideas? Thanks

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-03-02 21:07:09)

Allan · 2011-03-01 04:45:05

If two packages provide an empty directory and one of those packages gets removed, then pacman removes that empty directory. That is obviously the wrong thing to do, but there is no fix yet.

Leonid.I · 2011-03-01 05:13:44

Allan wrote:

That is obviously the wrong thing to do, but there is no fix yet.

Arguable, but still... which package attempts to remove things from /media? And what about /etc/ca-certificates? What confuses me, is the apparent lack of correlation between different installations, which points out to a "hidden" bug, if any.

EDIT: The only 'fix' seems to be a force reinstall (-S/-Sf).

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-03-01 05:15:20)

Leonid.I · 2011-03-01 16:30:05

OK, I got it. The problem is indeed related to uninstalling: /media disappeared after removal of hal and /etc/ca-certificates -- after removing ca-certificates-java... sorry for confusion.

ANOKNUSA · 2011-03-01 17:13:31

Leonid.I wrote:

OK, I got it. The problem is indeed related to uninstalling: /media disappeared after removal of hal <snip>

Several folk had the same problem after upgrading to KDE 4.6; no one seemed sure precisely what the culprit is. I'm gonna try and reproduce this and check for/file a bug report. You may have maimed two birds with one stone, Leonid.I

Allan · 2011-03-01 17:32:51

It is easily reproduced and there is a test in the pacman code base (currently failing) to remind us about it: http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.gi … d=e8f799ba

It is also easily fixed... The drawback is that it would require reading the filelists for every installed package on a removal operation rather than just that packages being removed. This is an issue given the filelists are spread over one file per package so there will likely be a large performance hit (although no benchmarks are done yet). So actually fixing this might be put off until we improve the local database format further.

ANOKNUSA · 2011-03-01 17:57:40

I just whipped off a post to flyspray, probably as you were typing your reply. I sent my request for a subscription to the mailing list yesterday, and haven't gotten a reply yet; sorry for dumping this on you guys again.

Leonid.I · 2011-03-01 18:17:24

ANOKNUSA wrote:

Leonid.I wrote:
OK, I got it. The problem is indeed related to uninstalling: /media disappeared after removal of hal <snip>
Several folk had the same problem after upgrading to KDE 4.6; no one seemed sure precisely what the culprit is. I'm gonna try and reproduce this and check for/file a bug report. You may have maimed two birds with one stone, Leonid.I

If you mean hal, then at some point, it creates a data file /media/.hal-mtab, which on old installations (that went through a lot of ext media mounts), saves the dir, even if hal is removed. Of course, a separate question is why does hal contain /media. But otherwise, Allan is right: there is no natural good way of fixing this pacman behavior.

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-03-01 19:04:43)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-03-01 04:38:59

[RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#2 2011-03-01 04:45:05

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#3 2011-03-01 05:13:44

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#4 2011-03-01 16:30:05

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#5 2011-03-01 17:13:31

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#6 2011-03-01 17:32:51

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#7 2011-03-01 17:57:40

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

#8 2011-03-01 18:17:24

Re: [RESOLVED] How does pacman handle empty package directories?

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