[SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

levi · 2021-11-12 22:07:32

So far, I've managed to get the system booting again properly by reinstalling linux, but I've been left with a python-scipy error every time I do any operation in pacman:

error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/python-scipy-1.7.2-1.0/desc: No such file or directory

Indeed in that folder I only have a mtree gzip compressed file. I can't reinstall python-scipy because it says the package is corrupted. I still have the package files in my /var/cache, but I'm not sure what to do next. Should I delete the python-scipy folder in /var/lib/pacman/local? Or is there some other way to get pacman to recover gracefully?

Last edited by levi (2021-11-12 22:57:45)

mrfu · 2021-11-12 22:26:37

Did you try to reinstall the local package in /var/cache/pacman/pkg via pacman -U?

Or try to download the upgraded package from archive.archlinux32.org and install it via
pacman -U

But it may be the only way to delete /var/lib/pacman/local/python-scipy-1.7.2-1.0/ pretending it had never been installed and then reinstall

Not sure wether this is helpful, but this would be the steps i would take

levi · 2021-11-12 22:56:03

Thanks, but python -U based solutions also fall over when it discovers that it's archive in /var/lib/pacman/local is borken too. Seems that in /var/lib/pacman/local there is just a folder for every installed package, so deleting it entirely might help, or it might have another record of the package being installed and that just confused it further.

In fact I just tried it out by moving the folder into my home directory and by judiciously applying --overwrite arguments to cover over everything it had already installed, and that seems to have fixed it. Thanks!

abaumann · 2021-11-13 07:50:48

Yes, that's a thing I'm noticing lately not only on IA-32, but also on ARM. Pacman looses some of those 'desc', 'files' files. I usually just copy them from a similar machine with same architecture and the reinstall the package. I'm not sure, if this could be a bug in pacman itself?

On RaspPIs I always blamed a dying SDcard for this (which usually also turned out to be the case).

levi · 2021-11-13 14:59:49

Well, in this case I suspect I turned if off while it was updating python-scipy, hence the incomplete record. Could the same event be happening to you?

I assume reinstalling linux helped because that triggered a rebuild of my initcpios. When you do an upgrade involving the kernel if first deletes the initicpios before upgrading everything and finally rebuilds the initcpios. Thanks to turning if off in the middle of an upgrade, I ended up with a machine with no initcpios, which unsuprprsingly wasn't too keen on booting. Reinstalling linux generated those, allowing the machine to boot, but still python-scipy was borked, the fix for which is documented in this thread.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-11-12 22:07:32

[SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

#2 2021-11-12 22:26:37

Re: [SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

#3 2021-11-12 22:56:03

Re: [SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

#4 2021-11-13 07:50:48

Re: [SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

#5 2021-11-13 14:59:49

Re: [SOLVED]-Borked machine by shutting down wh/ pacman upgrade was going

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