This morning all my Manjaro machines have an error with regards to the Community repo as follows;
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from manjaro.kurdy.org : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.easyname.at : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from ftp.gwdg.de : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from ask4.mm.fcix.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from ftp.rz.tu-bs.de : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.netcologne.de : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from ftp.tu-chemnitz.de : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.23m.com : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.alpix.eu : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed to synchronize all databases (failed to retrieve some files)
So… This might sound like a naive question, but… I wonder why there was no transitional package that fixed this configuration issue? I mean, all the facts were known by the maintainers well beforehands, so it would have been easy to publish a package that just removes the community repo references from the pacman config files once they were empty anyway? I can easily google and fix the issue, but other users will definitely not be able to do that without help. That’s a bit unfortunate, I think.
There was an update announcement for this when it was done, way back in July of 2023 already:
…with proper instructions on how to merge the files.
The fact that you rs weren’t suggests you haven’t been doing proper maintenance, which in turn suggests you have many .pacnew files to attend. It would be in your best interest to handle those A.S.A.P.:
Mirdarthos, you are, of course, correct in your observation that I could have caught this way ago. However, allow me to point out that that does not address my question, which was why this is not handled automatically, especially since this is a breaking change. If there is a good reason not to fix this automagically, then I’d be interested to hear it; if not, well, then I do think it would be a good idea to fix things like this automatically and not depend on the sysadmin to fix it.
I’d also like to point out that the IMHO such a breaking change should NEVER occur unless it absolutely cannot be avoided, which I don’t think is the case here. Personally, I have absolutely no problem fixing this, as I have mentioned, but I am dead certain that about five users around me that run Manjaro are not savvy enough to parse .pacnew and .pacsave files and fix the relevant config files. Unless you suggest that those users should stay away from Manjaro (which I kindo don’t expect), this is an issue that very unnecessarily creates problems for quite a lot of users (irrespective of whether or not they are “good” system administrators that read and bit-compare every .pacsave or .pacnew file and whether or not it would be better if they were able to and did so – and I agree that it would be better if everybody read those files and acted accordingly, but alas, it is totally unrealistic to expect that IMHO).
It was not a breaking change at the time (more than a year ago - or even two).
Back then it was addressed by a .pacnew file - which you neglected to merge.
It kept working until now, when the community repo was finally shut down.
.pacnew files are a thing you are expected to tend to when using this distribution
It’s how gradual changes over time are addressed.
… hard to impossible to automate for every use case, as you (as the admin) could have made changes to these files yourself for a number of reasons
Simply replacing the “new” with the “old” will rarely work and would destroy the adjustments that you may have made over time.
as said above:
realistic or not (in your view) - it is how the distribution is set up to work
And it is not a secret.
The community repo was deprecated two years ago. I removed it from my pacman.conf immediately upon seeing the announcement in 2023 stating that it should be removed. Running a rolling release Linux distro like Manjaro or Arch requires paying attention to announcements like these for instructions on dealing with changes. It is not the distro’s responsibility to automatically make such changes for you.
Well, they dont disappear automatically.
Either they have been removed ~somehow~.
Or … you simply have not gathered any yet … which is possible on a relatively new system.
In the case of the files in question here you could try to reinstall pacman I guess;
sudo pacman -Syu pacman
And/or we could simply look at the /etc/pacman.conf and observe whether there is a [community] repo section.
Well this system runs now for i think 10 years? I think i set it up when Ryzen 2400G was released ;). I think i reinstalled once when i got a bigger M.2-SSD ;).
Maybe i got the message months ago and can just not remember and did not handle it correctly … pacnew-checker shows the pacnew files and after inspecting and making changes it deletes the pacnew file if i’m not mistaken. Maybe i messed it up back then .
EDIT: I removed the community section … it works now. I was just wondering where it went wrong.
A .pacnew file is created during an update if changes are required for a system configuration file that has been modified from default, instead of over-writing the file with default settings
Merging .pacnew files is part of the update process that must be managed by user to ensure custom settings and preferences are retained
manjaro-pacnew-checker was created 18 months ago to assist users with managing .pacnew files – Check and manage pacnew files
Pacman log would show If a .pacnew file was created in a previous update
I think the OP might also have missed the split of the original pacman package, which placed the pacdiff command in the now separate pacman-contrib package.
… i do not remember getting one in the last months.