Pamac suddenly started asking for choosing a provider for pamac

Hello,

Yesterday when trying to update my packages through pamac’s GUI I incurred into an error: there was no mirrors for pamac to use. This happened probably after an update I did some days before. When I checked the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file it was empty so I updated it using pamac’s GUI. This fixed the error yesterday but an AUR package wasn’t able to update: pamac-tray-icon-plasma. Funny enough this package was and is installed via official repos I tried removing it using pamac GUI, pamac CLI and pacman. The removal went okay but when installing the package again it keeps appearing in pamac GUI as an AUR pending update. This is not a big deal but now comes the weirder part of the issue. I use brave and the browser stopped working suddenly too (something related to the profile being used by another brave process) so I went to reinstall it but when trying to do so pamac launches this dialog, that I’ve never seen before:
image

And after choosing one I get this:

And this:
image

I find these errors quite weird because as of my understanding pamac is in the official repos not an AUR package. However if I disable AUR from pamac the provider dialog disappears but I still get the second error that says target not found: ...

If I try to install the package using pacman it works okay.

Here you have my /etc/pamac.conf:

### Pamac configuration file

## When removing a package, also remove those dependencies
## that are not required by other packages (recurse option):
RemoveUnrequiredDeps

## How often to check for updates, value in hours (0 to disable):
RefreshPeriod = 6

## When no update is available, hide the tray icon:
NoUpdateHideIcon

## When applying updates, enable packages downgrade:
EnableDowngrade

## When installing packages, do not check for updates:
#SimpleInstall

## Allow Pamac to search and install packages from AUR:
EnableAUR

## Keep built packages from AUR in cache after installation:
#KeepBuiltPkgs

## When AUR support is enabled check for updates from AUR:
CheckAURUpdates

## When check updates from AUR support is enabled check for vcs updates:
#CheckAURVCSUpdates

## AUR build directory:
BuildDirectory = /var/tmp

## Number of versions of each package to keep when cleaning the packages cache:
KeepNumPackages = 3

## Remove only the versions of uninstalled packages when cleaning the packages cache:
#OnlyRmUninstalled

## Download updates in background:
#DownloadUpdates

## Offline upgrade:
#OfflineUpgrade

## Maximum Parallel Downloads:
MaxParallelDownloads = 10

#CheckFlatpakUpdates

#EnableSnap

#EnableFlatpak

And my /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

##
## Manjaro Linux custom mirrorlist
## Generated on 2024-01-17 14:23
##
## Please use 'pacman-mirrors -id' To reset custom mirrorlist
## Please use 'pacman-mirrors -c all' To reset custom mirrorlist
## To remove custom config run  'pacman-mirrors -c all'
##

## Country : Global
Server = https://mirrors.manjaro.org/repo/stable/$repo/$arch

## Country : Global
Server = https://mirrors2.manjaro.org/stable/$repo/$arch

## Country : Global
Server = https://mirrors.cicku.me/manjaro/stable/$repo/$arch

EDIT 2024/01/17 17:11

I did some more research and ran the following commands:

# pacman -Suu && pacman -Syyu

This downgraded some packages and now has fixed the error regarding the provider for pamac. But I’m still unable to install or update packages due to the following:

$ pamac upgrade
Preparing…
Synchronizing package databases…
Warning: installing filesystem (2023.09.18-1) breaks dependency ‘filesystem>=2023.12.21’ required by plymouth
Add plymouth to remove
Error: Failed to prepare transaction:
could not satisfy dependencies:
- removing plymouth breaks dependency ‘plymouth’ required by plymouth-kcm
Warning: base-devel: downgrading from version 1-2 to version 1-1
Warning: cryptsetup: downgrading from version 2.6.1-3.4 to version 2.6.1-3
Warning: filesystem: downgrading from version 2023.12.21-1 to version 2023.09.18-1
Warning: pacman: downgrading from version 6.0.2-16 to version 6.0.2-8
Resolving dependencies…
Checking inter-conflicts…
Error: Failed to prepare transaction:
could not satisfy dependencies:
- removing plymouth breaks dependency ‘plymouth’ required by plymouth-kcm

1 Like

What is the output from

ls -lh /var/{tmp/pamac/dbs,lib/pacman}/sync

Here’s what I got

$ ls -lh /var/{tmp/pamac/dbs,lib/pacman}/sync

sync:
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 128 KiB Wed Jan 17 12:34:06 2024  core.db
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 2 MiB Wed Jan 17 12:41:54 2024  core.files
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 8 MiB Wed Jan 17 16:57:59 2024  extra.db
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 41 MiB Wed Jan 17 16:57:59 2024  extra.files
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 25 KiB Mon Sep 11 10:30:55 2023  mhwd.db
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 139 KiB Wed Jan 17 12:29:57 2024  multilib.db
rw-r–r-- 1 angel angel 209 KiB Wed Jan 17 12:29:57 2024  multilib.files
rw-rw-rw- 1 angel angel 0 B Wed Jan 17 17:09:56 2024  refresh_timestamp

sync:
rw-r–r-- 1 root root 145 KiB Tue Jan 16 03:27:19 2024  core.db
rw-r–r-- 1 root root 8 MiB Wed Jan 17 16:57:59 2024  extra.db
rw-r–r-- 1 root root 25 KiB Mon Sep 11 10:30:55 2023  mhwd.db
rw-r–r-- 1 root root 143 KiB Sat Jan 13 02:38:44 2024  multilib.db

Thanks for that. Looking and the output of this and specially to /var/tmp/pamac/dbs I saw that the owner of /sync was root. I ran

# pacman -Syy && pamac upgrade --force-refresh

This changed the owner of /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync to my user and seems to have fixed the issue.

It seems that the /sync folders of both pacman and pamac need to be in sync if not both utilities could return different results so that --force-refresh flag is forcing the sync. The ownership problems could be raised by running pamac-cli as root (that I don’t remember doing) this could potentially lead to the data being controlled by the root user, and it might create problems when you run pamac as a regular user. The out of sync problem could be raised by running:

# pacman -Syy

too.

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