Arch Linux

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

In case you haven't seen the front page news: https://dev.archlinux.org/news/391/

When attempting to update to gpm 1.20.3-1, you will most likely get the following error message:

error: could not prepare transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
gpm: /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

This error arises because the /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 symlink became disassociated from the package (FS#9949). This is fixed in gpm 1.20.3-1 but its upgrade needs to be forced:

# pacman -Syf gpm
# pacman -Syu

m3tr0g33k

Member

From: Staffordshire, UK

Registered: 2008-05-04

Posts: 22

Website

Re: gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

Thankyou!

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Change is inevitable; progress less so.

nDray

Member

From: Portugal

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 143

Website

Re: gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

I'm not quite sure why this happened, can you enlighten me?
I thought that pacman, when upgrading, removes the old package and only then installs the new one, thus removing files that become dissociated and may later become associated again. Isn't this right? What went wrong?

bender02

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 1,328

Re: gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

I'm not quite sure why this happened, can you enlighten me?
I thought that pacman, when upgrading, removes the old package and only then installs the new one, thus removing files that become dissociated and may later become associated again. Isn't this right? What went wrong?

There was a packaging bug in the previous version, and the link /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 was not owned by the package gpm. I'm sure you can figure out the rest

nDray

Member

From: Portugal

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 143

Website

Re: gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

Yes, that becomes clear... I couldn't see any other way of that happening...

bji

Member

Registered: 2008-05-19

Posts: 20

Re: gpm 1.20.3-1 in Core

Thanks for posting about this.  I also ran into this issue and as a newbie to Arch, was confused at first but it didn't take me long to figure out the solution.  Thankfully Arch is as straightforward to configure and use as its developers intended, so this was not a big problem to overcome.

I have been using Linux since 1994, my first distribution being Yggdrasil, which hasn't existed for a long time.  I've been a RedHat user continuously since 1997 and have been very staunch in my support of RedHat but I think I have found a new favorite distribution.  Thanks Arch team for creating a distribution that actually seems to Make Sense