I think switching branches wiki needs an improvement

[nikgnomic]

@cscs

IMHO the wonkiness OP describes is because of their sync status and unsupported packages in the first place.

But that requires a bit of responsible adulting rather than throwing toys out of the pram in Testing update announcement

@anon51566685

I vote for “read manual and use some brain”

1st part is normal due-diligence that everyone should consider before commenting:
man pacman-mirrors
man pacman

2nd part should be no challenge for a competent user on Testing branch

[LA-MJ]

@soundofthunder

Do you happen to have yay-bin (or another package) installed from AUR that happens to include pacman-6.1.x among its dependencies?

No. Just yay

[LA-MJ]

@cscs

neither should be needed.

Oh but it was. Whatever the logic pacman is using to determine whether a database refresh is needed was not picking up the changes correctly. Maybe stable dbs were newer than testing, Idk, I have no insight into these internals

[Takakage]

My experience was essentially the same as LA-MJ when I switched from Stable to Testing earlier this month.

• I only use pacman; no pamac, yay, or other AUR helpers.
• All packages from AUR are pre-compiled binaries (google-chrome, zoom). No alternative versions of Manjaro repository packages.
• I first verified that my mirror was up-to-date on https://repo.manjaro.org/
• I then ran pacman -Syu, and received the same message as LA-MJ.
• 30 seconds later, without changing mirrors, I ran pacman -Syyu and the switch from Stable to Testing ran as expected.

As an example, if I look at the current status of the databases, I see

Branch	Repository	Date
Stable	Core	Sat May 18 2024 04:55
Testing	Core	Sat May 18 2024 12:27
Stable	Extra	Mon May 20 2024 15:09
Testing	Extra	Mon May 20 2024 15:05

The Stable Core database is older than Testing, so pacman would download a fresh copy, as expected. However, the Stable Extra database is newer than Testing.

If I had an up-to-date Stable system, and tried to switch to Testing at this time, it seems reasonable that pacman would determine that my local Extra database was not in need of refreshing, and would not download a fresh version unless forced to do so. Without a forced refresh, pacman would try to give me the latest version of pacman from the new Core, together with older versions of libpamac and pacutils from the old Extra, producing the error message from the first post.

[Yochanan]

@LA-MJ

I think switching branches wiki needs an improvement.

In most cases, what the wiki says will work. However, you encountered a situation that required more advanced options. The -yy and -uu flags should only be used in very specific use cases.

Using -yy improperly could force sync an outdated mirror and break everything. That’s why most of the time it’s recommended to never use it. Even Allan, the developer of Pacman says so. Good luck arguing with him about his own tool.

Keep in mind our wiki is created by and for the community. Anyone can submit new things and propose changes.

Anyway, this thread has gone on long enough and is no longer constructive.