Arch Linux

flywheel

Member

Registered: 2025-03-24

Posts: 2

How to find which package update out of many breaks my system

Hey everyone, I'm stuck trying to resolve the following issue, and would love some tips from the community:

I recently updated everything (pacman -Syu) after not touching my computer for a month. After the update, every time I open a browser, my entire system freezes and the only thing I can do is restart the computer. Fortunately, I had everything backed up so was able to go back to the old versions where everything works. I can't figure out how to debug my issue. For context, I am using Hyprland and a Framework 13 comupter. Here's what I tried:

1) Most applications seem to work fine after the update. Firefox immediately freezes the whole system. Chrome freezes the system after a few seconds. Once the system froze after a while of using Telegram. This makes me thinks its an issue not with the browsers but with the amount of resources they use.
2) Firefox is not one of the updated packages.
3) System logs have no entries between when I start the computer and shutdown begins when I press the power button after the freeze.
4) firefox logs also show no errors.

I would like to figure out which package update is causing the issue, but there are about 150 updated packages. I wanted to update them one at a time to see when it breaks, but I realized that this is very hard to do. I learned that the hard way after updating the icu package before updating pacman and it broke everything, including pacman (had to manually download an old version on anothe computer and transfer with a usb stick). Also, for example when I update Telegram, I need to update abseil-cpp as well for it to work, but if I update abseil-cpp without updating hyprland, then hyprland doesn't work at all. Maybe I'm not understanding something because I thought pacman was supposed to automatically handle these kinds of dependencies when running 'pacman -S packgname'.

Thanks to all in advance!

mackin_cheese

Member

Registered: 2025-01-07

Posts: 356

Re: How to find which package update out of many breaks my system

I need to update abseil-cpp as well for it to work, but if I update abseil-cpp without updating hyprland, then hyprland doesn't work at all. Maybe I'm not understanding something because I thought pacman was supposed to automatically handle these kinds of dependencies when running 'pacman -S packgname'.

Pacman -S doesn't update other applications unless you did a pacman -Sy beforehand, which is of course not recommended. Outside of that, running pacman -S doesn't update any dependencies for other packages.

Last edited by mackin_cheese (2025-03-25 00:31:22)

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 13,466

Re: How to find which package update out of many breaks my system

You can use the arch linux archive to narrow down the problem package by updating in steps to the repo state on specific dates.

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_L … cific_date

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

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

flywheel

Member

Registered: 2025-03-24

Posts: 2

Re: How to find which package update out of many breaks my system

You can use the arch linux archive to narrow down the problem package by updating in steps to the repo state on specific dates.

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_L … cific_date

Ooh that's a good idea. Will try this.

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,219

Re: How to find which package update out of many breaks my system

Have you tried with default configs?  Try moving ~/.config to ~/.config.bak and restarting.