Since today I am unable to use pamac with the AUR. Apparently there are issues on multiple levels:
All pamac commands dealing with the AUR fail with:
** Message: 16:04:57.931: aur_plugin.vala:317: downloading AUR data
Failed to read AUR data from /var/tmp/pamac/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz : Error opening file /var/tmp/pamac/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz: No such file or directory
Pamac fails to say what it is trying to download and why it is failing. There seems to be no verbose mode to force pamac to say what it is trying to accomplish.
Notwistanding problem 2, it seems reasonable that pamac tries to download https://aur.manjaro.org/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz. But the site is broken. Trying to get to it with a browser returns
Bad Gateway
CDN77 server is unable to reach website's origin server.
If this is the case, then pamac error is very misleading. The error message seems to suggest that a local file is missing, while the actual error is that a website is unavailable.
Getting the file from http://aur.archlinux.org/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz and dropping it on /var/tmp/pamac/ makes pamac happy. It is unclear if this is the correct thing to do, tough. Is manjaro’s packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz meant to be the same as arch’s? If so, is the location https://aur.manjaro.org/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz hardwired in pamac? I am unable to find it in pamac.conf. If it is hardwired, why is it hardwired? Wouldn’t it be better to have it in the config file?
If I remember the discussion from a year or two ago correctly, Arch blocked Manjaro users from accessing http://aur.archlinux.org/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz via Pamac due to the fact that Pamac tries to download the file every time it synchronises databases, which happens whenever a user installs a package or updates their system. It was really hammering the Arch servers.
** Message: 11:13:24.001: aur_plugin.vala:317: downloading AUR data
Failed to read AUR data from /var/tmp/pamac/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz : Error opening file /var/tmp/pamac/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz: No such file or directory
It is still down (Jan 18th, 10:17 utc):
Is there any backup URL to get this missing file (packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz)?
The size of this file is much higher than the Manjaro one. Yesterday, when tried to open it it said that the file is corrupted.
Few hours after my yesterday post the Manjaro URL was working again. If the gateway still bad for some of You, try to clear your DNS cache or reboot computer AND network equipements.