Corrupted protobuf package

[chameau]

I been away for over 3 months, so when I came back my PC needed a lot of updates. I usually just use the gui pamac but because it’s been a long time I thought it be safer to use ‘pacman’ in the terminal.

sudo pacman -Syu 

After a while I was presented with the following message

error: protobuf: signature from "Bert Peters (packager key) <bertptrs@archlinux.org>" is unknown trust
:: file /var/cache/pacman/pkg/protobuf-30-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)). 
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n] 

I assumed that that last question referred just to this package (protobuf), but when I clicked Yes, the whole update was cancelled!

Do you want to delete it? [Y/n] y
error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Thinking maybe it’s a mirror issue, I updated the mirror list

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack

and then tried again but this time with ‘Syyu’
Alas it made no difference - I still got the same error.
I searched this forum and while there were a few posts with ‘protobuf’, the most recent was from 2024 and non resembled my issue.
Is that a know issue? Is there a work around? Should I wait for an update to fix the issue? or how can I update all except ‘protobuf’? Thanks

[Ben]

Ah, I wrote a short script to check mirrors before running updates… The ‘continental’ approach is nice, fast, and a little gentler on servers… it clears up any red or yellow status mirrors if you’re in a hurry (y) or defaults to leaving it to another day (N).

#!/bin/bash

# Initial mirror status check
pacman-mirrors

# Prompt for update confirmation
read -rp "Do you want to find new mirrors for your continent? [y/N] " confirm
confirm=${confirm,,}  # Convert input to lowercase

if [[ "$confirm" == "y" ]]; then
    echo "Updating mirrors for your continent..."
    sudo pacman-mirrors --continent

    # Show updated mirror status
    echo -e "\nMirrors updated. Current status:"
    pacman-mirrors
else
    echo "Mirror update cancelled."
fi

I put it in /usr/local/bin (chmod +x too) and run ‘mirror’ to do a mirrors check and ask me to do ‘continent’ search for fresh mirrors… though if you update a day or so later it’s usually ok.

For your case, I’d suggest removing the protobuf package, get the update done, and then reinstall protobuf again later. I have it installed, and the update is finished, so it’s not a ‘real’ problem; just a messy sync I guess.

[Takakage]

Update the archlinux-keyring package first. See ArchWiki: Upgrade system regularly

sudo pacman -Sy --needed archlinux-keyring && sudo pacman -Su

[chameau]

Thanks that did the trick!
As I’m retired and travelling more, this is likely to happen again in the future.
I took a note of the command and also bookmarked the ArchWiki article so I should know what to do next time.