Pacman is broken. :-(

semck · 2009-11-12 22:03:17

Hi all,

I have screwed up pacman and am now in trouble. I hope somebody can help and will appreciate suggestions.

Basically I was trying to install mplayer, and ran into a dependency issue with libcap version 2 (it wanted 1). So I decided to rebuild it using ABS. But then when I built mplayer, it needed a package not in my repository database, so I ran pacman -Syu. It seemed to download the updates, but said pacman should be upgraded first, so I said yes. Then it said there was a conflict with lzma-utils, should I remove it -- so I said yes. It couldn't because of yelp. So I decided to give up, but then noticed that pacman wouldn't work for anything anymore -- if I tried it, it would say I had to upgrade pacman first. And I couldn't, and I couldn't uninstall yelp or lzma-utils. Finally (stupidly) I tried pacman -Sd pacman, which downloaded a new pacman, which won't run because it can't find libfetch.so. Needless to say, I'm in no position to track down libfetch.

Is there any way to save this?

Thank you,
Stephen

ataraxia · 2009-11-12 22:13:42

Download the current versions of the lzma-utils and libfetch packages by hand, and unpack them using plain "tar". Copy in the libraries from those packages by hand enough to get pacman to run again. Then, install those packages again "the right way" with pacman so everything is tracked properly.

grey · 2009-11-12 22:29:05

Alternative idea: boot the arch liveCD, which has pacman installed. Then mount the root filesystem of your installation and (re)install packages with pacman --root <where you just mounted it>.
It gets more complicated if your partioning scheme is more complex than just /root and /home.

semck · 2009-11-13 00:06:29

Thank you! Ataraxia, your idea seems to have worked. I couldn't figure out how to install lzma-utils, but libfetch was enough it seems. (I never actually successfully uninstalled lzma-utils).

Thank you grey, as well.

Does there happen to be a way, moving forward, to remove lzma-utils and get the new yelp, etc, with this circle in place?

Thanks!

grey · 2009-11-13 09:09:21

1. What are your current versions for pacman, libfetch, libarchive and xz-utils (the latter is the provider of lzma-utils)?
2. Were you able to run pacman -Sy ?

quarkup · 2009-11-13 10:55:48

hey just check the /var/log/pacman.log file and you will know what packages you need to recover.
second,
get the packages (using wget or a browser) from a mirror (if you want to downgrade something use this: http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/core/os/)

then you should use tar to extract the files then copy it to your system
like
tar -xzf <package>
cd <package-dir>
(as root) cp -af ./etc /etc/ # the same for all directories you got there

then after you have that up, do a pacman -Syu (it will probably tell you there are files on the system)
if it tells you that, use also the pacman's -f flag to overwrite those files (which you copied to your system without telling pacman you had the package)

Last edited by quarkup (2009-11-13 10:57:43)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-12 22:03:17

Pacman is broken. :-(

#2 2009-11-12 22:13:42

Re: Pacman is broken. :-(

#3 2009-11-12 22:29:05

Re: Pacman is broken. :-(

#4 2009-11-13 00:06:29

Re: Pacman is broken. :-(

#5 2009-11-13 09:09:21

Re: Pacman is broken. :-(

#6 2009-11-13 10:55:48

Re: Pacman is broken. :-(

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