Help with pacman - GPGME error: No data; database is not valid

Does anyone know how to fix this error? I got it on Manjaro ARM following an update today.

pacman -Ss odbc
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: database 'core' is not valid (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
error: database 'extra' is not valid (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
error: database 'community' is not valid (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))

Alternatively,

sudo pacman -Syyu
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
:: Synchronising package databases...
 core                                                                                           233.5 KiB   449 KiB/s 00:01 [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] 100%
 extra                                                                                            2.4 MiB  1953 KiB/s 00:01 [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] 100%
 community                                                                                        5.9 MiB  3.59 MiB/s 00:02 [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] 100%
 manjaro-arm-games                                                                                6.3 KiB  17.1 KiB/s 00:00 [---------------------------------------------------------------------------] 100%
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: failed to synchronize all databases (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))

I’ve tried the following so far:

sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux

Hey, does updating your mirrors work?
eg: sudo pacman-mirrors -f 5 more here on pacman-mirrors

Just tried sudo pacman-mirrors -f 5, but the problem is still there.

Did you take a look at [manjaro-security] [MSA-202106-1] images were built with a per-initialised (and thus common) pacman local signing key

I guess the command is not complete :

sudo rm -rf /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
sudo pacman-key --init
(…)
for ARM: sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux manjaro archlinuxarm
manjaro-arm

I just tried this, but I’m getting the same errors. I noticed that during the pacman-key --populate ... command the following errors are popping up a lot:

gpg: key 786C63F330D7CB92: no user ID for key signature packet of class 10
gpg: key 1EB2638FF56C0C53: no user ID for key signature packet of class 10

Smeh, don’t worry about it. I need to do a re-install anyway. This is the excuse I need.

Delete the contents of /var/lib/Pacman/sync
And refresh database using Pamac.

1 Like

Thanks a lot. I had the same error, resulting in a total blockage of updates and strange errors involving 429 errors with AUR (I suppose it was just coincidence that I tried to update an AUR package when the error occurred and that’s why).
This fix was the only thing that worked after lots of research.