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#1 2018-09-20 12:25:08

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

When I check for updates I get results

$ checkupdates
gdbm 1.17-1 -> 1.18-1
mkinitcpio-busybox 1.29.2-1 -> 1.29.3-1

but if I try to update I get nothing

$ sudo pacman -Syu
[sudo] password for enrico: 
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

I'm pretty sure it's a temporary inconsistence, but I'm also curious about it.

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#2 2018-09-20 16:30:43

ua4000
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Registered: 2015-10-14
Posts: 402

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Check your mirrorlist and maybe update it  https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/ or use reflector.
Also you could try forcing the databases sync: pacman -Syyu

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#3 2018-09-21 13:37:26

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

@ua4000, by the short time between my question and your answer I succesfully run pacman and so all packages got updated. I'll try what you suggest next time I notice the same behavior. (From pacman's manual I see that doubling the -y option should do the job, so I'll try this first.)

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-21 13:39:05)

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#4 2018-09-21 18:03:51

jasonwryan
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Please remember to mark your thread as [Solved] by editing your first post and prepending it to the title.


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#5 2018-09-22 14:56:55

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Well, the problem (if it can be considered a real problem at all) is not solved, since I've had no chance to check if the suggested solution works or not.

Actually, I'm in the same situation now. And

# pacman -Syyu

doesn't do the job, so it seems I have to update the mirror list. I'll report as soon as I try, hoping the the problem persists long enough.

I've followed the suggested link and clicked on "generate list" then copied and prepended the long list to the file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, but nothing changes. Maybe I have to use specific setting to create the mirrorlist, no? Oh, btw, in /etc/pacman.d/ also a file named mirrorlist.pacnew and a folder named gnupg are present.

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-22 15:15:38)

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#6 2018-09-22 15:12:21

Trilby
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

The mirrorlist is a red herring.  Keeping your mirrorlist up to date is always a good idea, but a stale mirrorlist could not cause the symptoms you report as checkupdate uses the same mirrorlist (e.g., checks the same mirrors).

Of course if your first mirror is outdated and transiently fails ... and if it coincidentally failed when you ran checkupdates (so checkupdates used the second mirror) but then it worked when you ran pacman, that *could* explain the symptoms.  But that's a lot of 'ifs' and coincidences.

While I'm not sure what could causes it, a simpler explanation would be if some other processes is inappropriately updating mtimes on your databases.  As checkupdates uses a fresh set of databases in a fakeroot, it will retrieve them anew every time, but pacman will only sync it's databases if their mtimes are older than the remote version - and your pacman command showed that it did not attempt to even sync the databases.  `pacman -Syyu` would indeed work around this problem, but it is not the solution.

Edit: and if what you now say is true perhaps this hypothesis can also be ruled out if -Syyu doesn't help.  But if you want to get to the bottom of this, present information.  What is checkupdates output, and pacman's output?  What mirrors are you using / have you been using?

Last edited by Trilby (2018-09-22 15:14:24)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#7 2018-09-22 15:20:39

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

but then it worked when you ran pacman

Maybe I should underline that at a given moment pacman succesfully "realized that there was something to update", but (just like it's happening again) it didn't for a while, whereas in the same while checkupdates gave results.

If it is of any importance, or it can be of any help, now the output of the latter command is

nano 3.0-2 -> 3.1-1
sqlite 3.25.0-1 -> 3.25.1-1

Pacman's output is the same I posted in the very first post; if use add the second -y option, the output is practically the same, with four lines changed to

 core                                      134.3 KiB   619K/s 00:00 [#####################################] 100%
 extra                                    1635.4 KiB   600K/s 00:03 [#####################################] 100%
 community                                   4.6 MiB   585K/s 00:08 [#####################################] 100%
 multilib                                  172.9 KiB   604K/s 00:00 [#####################################] 100

but I bet this adds nothing to the output of pacman -Syu.

The existing /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file is quite long, do you want me to paste it here?

About the one I've appended as suggested (not by you), I've obtained as I wrote in the preceding message.

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-22 15:27:13)

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#8 2018-09-22 15:31:17

Trilby
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

And what does `pacman -Si nano sqlite` return?  And what about `pacman -Q nano sqlite`?

For the mirrorlist, please post the first several mirrors.  Note that appending to a long mirrorlist will have little to no effect.  Mirrors are attempted in the order in which they appear in the mirrorlist.  If the first mirrors are problematic, adding others at the end will rarely if ever have any effect.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-09-22 15:32:55)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#9 2018-09-22 15:32:56

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

The former

$ pacman -Si nano sqlite
Repository      : core
Name            : nano
Version         : 3.0-2
Description     : Pico editor clone with enhancements
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://www.nano-editor.org
Licenses        : GPL
Groups          : base
Provides        : None
Depends On      : ncurses  file  sh
Optional Deps   : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Download Size   : 434.89 KiB
Installed Size  : 2334.00 KiB
Packager        : Andreas Radke <andyrtr@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Wed 12 Sep 2018 09:20:28 PM CEST
Validated By    : MD5 Sum  SHA-256 Sum  Signature

Repository      : core
Name            : sqlite
Version         : 3.25.0-1
Description     : A C library that implements an SQL database engine
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://www.sqlite.org/
Licenses        : custom:Public Domain
Groups          : None
Provides        : sqlite3=3.25.0
Depends On      : readline  zlib
Optional Deps   : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : sqlite3
Download Size   : 1350.10 KiB
Installed Size  : 8519.00 KiB
Packager        : Andreas Radke <andyrtr@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Sat 15 Sep 2018 08:08:50 PM CEST
Validated By    : MD5 Sum  SHA-256 Sum  Signature

the latter

$ pacman -Q nano sqlite
nano 3.0-2
sqlite 3.25.0-1

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#10 2018-09-22 15:34:12

Trilby
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Registered: 2011-11-29
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

So it would seem checkupdates and pacman are using different mirrors, so the unlikely (many ifs) theory I had in my previous post is sounding a bit more likely.  Knowing what the first mirrors in your mirrorlist would help.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#11 2018-09-22 15:36:45

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

By

Trilby wrote:

the first several mirrors

do you mean ALL THE mirrors before I appended? Or several of them? (I'm sorry, but I'm not native speaker and I haven't fully understood where "several" is in between "many" and "a few" roll )

Trilby wrote:

Note that appending to a long mirrorlist will have little to no effect.  Mirrors are attempted in the order in which they appear in the mirrorlist.

So I imagine that prepending have almost the effect of substituting.

These are the first ten mirrors

##
## Arch Linux repository mirrorlist
## Filtered by mirror score from mirror status page
## Generated on 2018-05-01
##

## Germany
Server = http://linux.rz.rub.de/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## Germany
Server = http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## Denmark
Server = http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## Ecuador
Server = http://mirror.cedia.org.ec/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = http://mirror.metrocast.net/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## Thailand
Server = http://mirror.adminbannok.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## Vietnam
Server = http://f.archlinuxvn.org/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = http://il.us.mirror.archlinux-br.org/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = http://archlinux.us-west.mirror.zoidplex.net/$repo/os/$arch

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-22 15:40:47)

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#12 2018-09-22 18:22:03

Trilby
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Your top mirrors seem fine by the checks I can run (they are at least currently up to date).  I'm not sure how checkupdates could give different results to pacman.

If you want to trace it further I'd suggest using the verbose flag to pacman to see which mirror it is *actually* using, but unfortunately checkupdates doesn't have a comparable flag.  Perhaps the best test would be to remove all but one mirror from your mirrorlist, that way pacman and checkupdates would have to use the same mirror (or just fail).


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#13 2018-09-22 18:28:24

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Well, in the meanwhile pacman succesfully did the update, so maybe this is why your check were passed...

So I can come back here next time the problem presents.

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#14 2018-09-27 18:44:12

Enrico1989
Member
Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

This time checkupdates gives

jfsutils 1.1.15-5 -> 1.1.15-6

while pacman's verbose output is

 
Root      : /
Conf File : /etc/pacman.conf
DB Path   : /var/lib/pacman/
Cache Dirs: /var/cache/pacman/pkg/  
Hook Dirs : /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/  /etc/pacman.d/hooks/  
Lock File : /var/lib/pacman/db.lck
Log File  : /var/log/pacman.log
GPG Dir   : /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/
Targets   : None
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 multilib is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

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#15 2018-09-27 18:49:31

jasonwryan
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From: .nz
Registered: 2009-05-09
Posts: 30,424
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Enrico1989 wrote:

while pacman's verbose output is...

No, that is not the full output. Don't post truncated logs: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855


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#16 2018-09-28 05:07:05

Enrico1989
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Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

It is the full output actually. The full output of

# pacman -vSyu

Should I have run some other command or is there something alarming in that output?

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-28 05:08:04)

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#17 2018-09-28 05:18:58

jasonwryan
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From: .nz
Registered: 2009-05-09
Posts: 30,424
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Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

pacman -Syu --debug

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#18 2018-09-28 06:17:15

Enrico1989
Member
Registered: 2018-07-05
Posts: 201

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

Ops, I'm so used to -v being verbose, and, having checked that it does exists for pacman, I've used it. Here is the requested output of pacman.
At the moment checkupdates gives

libelf 0.171-1 -> 0.174-1

Last edited by Enrico1989 (2018-09-28 20:22:08)

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#19 2019-01-22 14:35:42

bonob
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Registered: 2014-02-02
Posts: 23

Re: checkupdates gives results, but pacman says there's nothing to do

I just had the same case.
checkupdates reported new packages that pacman -Syyu did not, for the past 8 hours or so.
I solved it by changing the first mirror in my mirror list.
The first mirror in my list shows a number of errors in the Arch mirror status page over the last 24 hours.

This is a case I see regularly and I think I know the explanation, which would go as follows:

- the first mirror on my mirrorlist is out of date; it remains out of date for a while, that can last for a few days (it's difficult to find a mirror that is both fast and not subject to that kind of trouble in my country);
- at some point the mirror doesn't answer, and at that point checkupdates runs (I run it with conky every hour);
- checkupdates then goes to the second mirror and its db now contains a more up-to-date version;
- the first mirror comes back online, but is still outdated;
- now checkupdates remains on its newer db, even though it contacts the outdated mirror, while pacman at no point had the opportunity to query the second mirror.

Edit: That's actually exactly the first explanation that Trilby proposed. But it becomes less unlikely with the circumstances that the first mirror is outdated for an extended period, and that checkupdates runs hourly.

Last edited by bonob (2019-01-22 14:47:22)

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