Arch Linux

ekryyn

Member

Registered: 2015-02-23

Posts: 2

[solved] Pacman believes nothing is installed

Hello,
It's been a week or so I am not getting any update on my laptop when trying to run "pacman -Syu"

So I started to check if the mirrors I used were up to date, I changed the according to some listed as up to date in https://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/ .
Nothing changed, "pacman -Syyu" still told me there was no update.
Then... I discovered that nothing is installed, according to pacman. Pacman itself is not considered as install. And if I try to install it (with itself), it's listing me all the dependencies I am missing, ie, everything.
But for sure, I have some packages installed. So I didn't try to reinstall anything yet.
I am wondering if there is any way to help pacman to see the light and "rediscover" the installed packages without reinstalling them ?

Thank you !

Last edited by ekryyn (2015-03-18 17:10:50)

satanselbow

Member

Registered: 2011-06-15

Posts: 538

Re: [solved] Pacman believes nothing is installed

Pacman database recovery is covered quite comprehensively on the wiki

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [solved] Pacman believes nothing is installed

Post the output of

uname -a
pacman -Qq | wc -l
du -sh /var/lib/pacman/local

ekryyn

Member

Registered: 2015-02-23

Posts: 2

Re: [solved] Pacman believes nothing is installed

$ uname -a
Linux Tomato 3.18.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Feb 7 08:44:05 CET 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ pacman -Qq | wc -l
0
$ du -sh /var/lib/pacman/local
72K	/var/lib/pacman/local

The wiki indeed seems to cover my case, I couldn't make any google query to point me to this :
"pacman does not recognize installed packages", wiki is the first result, but I couldn't follow the track to the solution. Now that I know it needs a database recovery, my next search will be more efficient, better than "pacman is drunk"

I am following the wiki steps right now, thank you very much !
I'll mark it as resolved when finished (hopefully it will be resolved)

Last edited by ekryyn (2015-03-18 16:55:42)

satanselbow

Member

Registered: 2011-06-15

Posts: 538

Re: [solved] Pacman believes nothing is installed

better than "pacman is drunk"

pacman is an alcoholic... but we still love him