Arch Linux

vt220

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 16

pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

Immediately after performing a full upgrade (pacman -Syu) I installed kate (using a command 'pacman -S kate', version of the installed kate's package is 16.04.2-1). When trying to start it, I got the following message:

kate: error while loading shared libraries: libKF5Activities.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I see that the missing lib is provided by a package kactivities, and indeed this package is not installed on the machine. Also, I see that kactivities is listed as a dependency for kate.

How it can happen that pacman installed a package without also installing it's dependency?
Neither 'pacman -T kate' nor 'pacman -Qk' found anything wrong.

My machine is i686, version of pacman is 5.0.1-4

arojas

Developer

From: Spain

Registered: 2011-10-09

Posts: 2,098

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

My bet is you still have an old kactivities4 package lying around which provides kactivities. It's a good idea to do a regular cleanup of orphan packages.

vt220

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 16

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

Yes, indeed I have a package called kactivities4 which provides kactivities. Seems like a bug report for kactivities4 (should provide kactivities4 instead).

vt220

Member

Registered: 2012-10-03

Posts: 16

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

After a second thought, it is not clear whether it is a bug - kactivities4 & kactivities are marked as conflicting with one another, so it seems intentional.

Isn't it possible that two different packages depend on different versions of kactivities? Or maybe the maintainers already made sure that such a situation is impossible?

arojas

Developer

From: Spain

Registered: 2011-10-09

Posts: 2,098

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

The kactivities4 package has been dead for months - just remove it from your system

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,286

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

There is no real bug to fix. In this case there is no kactivities4 in the repos anymore, only a libkactivities4 unrelated to kate. You are expected to purge those packages yourself, because the old KDE4 packages are now considered "foreign packages", aka not in a repository available to pacman.

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,911

Re: pacman installed a package without installing it's required dependency

kactivities4 is no longer in repos, you should run pacman -Qm   (check man pacman) regularly to detect removed pacakges .
(there are more useful flags , check -Qdt ) .

For programs that do need qt4 kactitivies, libkactivities4 is the library that provides it.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)