TL;DR when package installation fails, crashes the system, and leaves behind a bunch of zero-sized files, what’s an appropriate recovery strategy? (2) Are there known issues with virtualbox or docker packages that could cause installation failures in the ‘Reloading device manager configuration stage’?
Details: I’m new to Manjaro (installed from manjaro-xfce-24.2.1-241216-linux612.iso), coming from Debian. After successfully installing and updating the system, I attempted to add some packages:
pacman -Syu xorg-xrandr fetchmail postfix docker virtualbox
This appeared to go OK, but during the post-transaction hooks I saw dialog like
(2/9) Reloading system manager configuration…
(3/9) Creating temporary files…
(4/9) Reloading device manager configuration…
at which point the system rebooted. I saw nothing in the syslog when it came back up, so I attempted to remove / reinstall the offending packages and narrow down which one caused it. I was somewhat stymied because a large number of files - perhaps everything that was to be installed? - in /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/man, /usr/lib, etc. were present, but zero-sized, generating messages like
libtlsrpt: /usr/lib/libtlsrpt.so.0 exists in filesystem
postfix: /etc/postfix/master.cf.proto exists in filesystem
Removing the packages with ‘pacman -R’ appears to work but does not remove these files, and reinstalling fails because they’re present. I don’t know if this corruption extends to the package database and not just the filesystem, although removing all zero-sized files reported by reinstalling a particular one of those packages (postfix, fetchmail) does seem to work.
I strongly suspect the problem is related to virtualbox, perhaps less likely related to docker - vbox requires a kernel module, for example - so have been hesitant to try and reinstall them.
Have been poking at the forum searchbox but not turning up advice on this - I apologize if my searching was inadequate and this is a known issue.