Arch Linux

jones

Member

Registered: 2013-03-14

Posts: 247

What should one do if a full system upgrade does not work?

A few days ago, during a system upgrade/update, an error popped up, roughly saying something like:

Could not update texlive-bin: /share/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb already exists in the filesystem
Update aborted.

As I didn't want to risk borking the system by a partial upgrade, I renamed the file and the upgrade worked, so now there is:

/share/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
/share/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb.bak

All is well with tex live.

1. Was that ok?
2. Are there other ways to mitigate the problem and get pacman to perform the full upgrade?

Because the only other possibility I can think of is the arguably risky one to force the update with --overwrite.

pacman -Syu --overwrite

(But I was too cautious to try that.)

Last edited by jones (2023-06-07 18:41:37)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 50,983

Re: What should one do if a full system upgrade does not work?

Just "--overwrite" won't work, you've to indicate what to overwrite and are discouraged only from using globs.
It's perfenctly fine to use that to overwrite an untracked file if you know why it's there (in this case a packaging error, it seems)
Removing the file manually is likewise ok, the only important thing is really to understand why the conflict exists itfp (which is why universal globbing is bad, because you might unconditionally overwrite files and miss the actual problem indicated by the conflict)

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