Can someone from the Manjaro team please look into this small pamac related bug?

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This bug has been bugging me (pun slightly intended :innocent:) for a while now, I know it’s a very small thing but it would be awesome if someone could take a quick look at it and hopefully resolve it.

You have my thanks in advance whoever you are. :blush:

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It is known that Pamac may continue to show update available after you have synced the system.

This is due to it being two different processes, executing at different times and the fact that foreign packages may be checked as well.

Disable update checking for foreign packages, e.g. AUR, flatpak and snap and verify if the issue persist.

My personal preference is to disable all update notifications.

I have my own flow for updating the system and therefore I don’t need to know when the repositories has changed.

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Hello, thank you for your quick response.

Is there no way to fix this? The main issue here is that what’s written inside the Pamac window “Your system is up to date” directly conflicts with the blue dot in the system tray which implies that there are still updates that are pending to be installed. This is confusing to the end user who doesn’t know which indication is the correct one: “Is my system fully updated or have I missed something somewhere?”

The current manual solution is to click on the refresh button inside the Pamac window and then after about 6-7 seconds later the blue dot in the system tray disappears. I suggest that the refresh button/command should be automatically executed after an update is done so that the blue dot will be cleared on its own without causing any confusion to the end user in the process… (and if there are any further updates, they will be displayed by this action)

Because otherwise the blue dot remains there permanently until the system is restarted or until Pamac is closed and restarted again.

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I agree with this. :slight_smile:

Note that I only use pamac for the few AUR packages I have and, occasionally, to look at the list of packages to be updated. It’s pacman for everything else. This is indeed a recommended practice, anyway. :wink:

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If pamac-tray-icon-plasma does not recognise that pamac-manager has updated system until
the system or Pamac is restarted, it might also be possible to clear this with:

pamac checkupdates --aur
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Yes, so do I. My solution was to manually run update repos from the pamac Hamburger menu (I hate that name, it doesn’t even look like a Hamburger)

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The thing is that I use Pamac almost exclusively in GUI mode and only for individual program updates or when I want to install new programs, for full system updates I usually log out from the GUI into a TTY and then sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 10 && time sudo pacman -Syu as is generally recommended by the manjaro team…

Also I don’t use the AUR (since it’s not recommended) only flatpaks are enabled for me in Pamac.

and finally the blue dot thing should go away by itself when all the updates are done. The user shouldn’t need to type a special command to clear it.

But I appreciate your feedback!

IKR right? they should have made it into a circle symbol and then we could have called it the Pizza menu instead! :face_savoring_food: How awesome would that have been? :grin:

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As long as they don’t put pineapple on it. :face_with_thermometer: :wink:

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Please refrain from using text-speak on the forum. The forum is comprised of people of all ages from all around the world, and not everyone is aware of what acronyms such as “IKR” mean.

The good news is that, after highlighting the “IKR” and right-clicking to do a Google search, I now know that it means “I know, right?”.

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I thought it stood for Imperial Klingon Raider. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll get me coat… :man_walking:

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Triple bar - Wikipedia

The triple bar or tribar, ≡, is a symbol with multiple, context-dependent meanings indicating equivalence of two different things. Its main uses are in mathematics and logic. It has the appearance of an equals sign ⟨=⟩ with a third line.

HTML: ≡ , ≡, ≡ or ≡

There is also a Chinese trigram for heaven/sky: ☰ ☰ or ☰

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There is a reason why the update and checkupdates is two different processes and that reason is why they don’t interact as you think they do.

system package metadata

The system’s package versions is based on the state of the current metadata versions as they are stored in /var/lib/pacman.

  • The sync folder holds the metadata files, listing all the applications including their versions.
  • The local folder holds the metadata about the currently installed applications and their files.

These folders MUST be kept in STRICT SYNC to ensure the overall system stability.

The system package manager is responsible for changing the state of the system.

update check

The update-checker is not the package manager but a separate application and this separate application MUST NOT EVER change the state of the running system.

Therefore, when the update-checker execute, it does so by

  • fetching a fresh version of the metadata from the primary mirror
  • storing said data in a temporary location
  • comparing the content of the local folder with the metadata
  • display an update notification if applicable
  • throwing away the temporary data

When the update-checker has displayed the notification, it goes dormant until the next scheduled interval arrives and a new check will be performed and the circle repeat itself.

what if

If the update-checker replaced the current metadata with the metadata it has downloaded THEN it has changed the system metadata state and this will cause discrepancies for the package manager e.g. it will assume a given version of a library is installed when it is not or it will revert an already installed version of the library to an incompatible version.

that is why

Since the package manager relies on the implied connections between the sync and local metadata

One should never execute pacman -Sy followed by a pacman -S <pkgname> because you don’t know the web that connects the package with the system and the package manager can no longer correctly connect the dots.

in the end

The update-checker is a separate application which has no knowledge of what the package manager does or does not do and thus the blue dot does not magically disappear unless you do a system restart.

You do not need to do a full restart as a smaller user-space restart is also possible or you could simply sign out and sign in again.

systemctl soft-reboot
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It might also be possible to reload the tray icon

$ pamac list -f pamac-tray-icon-plasma
/etc/xdg/autostart/pamac-tray-plasma.desktop
/usr/bin/pamac-tray-plasma
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Seriously… or even ketchup for that matter… :face_with_peeking_eye: *gasp*

Sorry, ingrained habits from spending a bit too much time on discord and things like that… :innocent:

Although to be fair almost everything is an acronym in this industry: AUR… GUI… TTY… there’s so many things to keep track of… and TTY stands for “teletypewriter” shouldn’t it technically be TTW in that case? :person_shrugging:t2:

That is correct sir! and it is good news indeed! :+1:t2:

lol! that too… :rofl:

xmen-coat

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Thank you very much for the in depth explanation, I do appreciate it. I agree that system stability should always be a priority as you described above.

But in the case of my suggestion does manually clicking this refresh button cause any instability? or is it safe to do? (cause that’s what I usually do)

Refresh1
Refresh11920×1024 53.1 KB

If it is safe to manually click after an update is done or after new software is installed then it should also be safe to invoke automatically (after new software is updated) which will resolve the issue that people are facing with the blue dot indicating that there are further updates when there are in fact none. (and if there are further updates it would automatically be displayed to them)

There are a few people in the bug report who said that they are facing the same issue and also two people in this forum thread as well. Can this not be safely implemented to solve the issue?

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oh wow that’s quite an impressive command there… :sweat_smile:

But I usually just click on the refresh button in the Pamac window and the blue dot goes away after a few seconds. It’s a lot quicker for me.

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Actually it stands for Tele TYpe. If it ever referred to the writer bit, that word was silent. by the 1970s when I first came across the word

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But imagine how Carl Sagan would feel if he were still alive to hear you say that! :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." - Carl Sagan “Pale Blue Dot”

It took me a minute (or two) to mentally make the connection to what you were referring to, then I remembered that picture and that quote…

Good one Aragorn san. :blush::globe_showing_americas::+1:t2:

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Pamac GUI can also show package files

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