I run KDE stable and I use konsole to check for updates with pamac checkupdates. That used to find when updates were available, but lately it has ceased to find anything. To test it I have renamed /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync to sync.OLD, but when I run pamac checkupdates it does not create a new /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync and still claims Your system is up to date.
I do not use pacman -Sy because then I have to use sudo and type my password, and pamac checkupdates is quicker and should work just as well.
I ran sudo mv /var/lib/pacman/sync /var/lib/pacman/sync.OLD and when I then opened a new konsole to avoid sudo and ran pamac checkupdates it created a new /var/lib/pacman/sync and listed all the packages to update. It did nothing in /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/ , so what is the purpose of /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync ?
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I just used pamac for the update and it went without any problems. I suggest you update the mirror list and then the package database followed by doing the update:
sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack=5
Update your package database and any packages from the repositories:
pamac upgrade --force-refresh --no-aur
Then update any AUR packages you might have installed:
pamac upgrade --aur
A Reminder: While use of the AUR is possible, it’s neither recommended nor supported. See:
I removed /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/ , but pamac upgrade creates /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/ with symbolic link /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/local pointing to /var/lib/pacman/local/ and subdirectory /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync/ with the files core.db extra.db multilib.db packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz refresh_timestamp that are not hardlinks to the files in /var/lib/pacman/sync/ with the same names.
I suspect that pamac checkupdates just looks at the files in /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync/ and fails to check the mirror for changes and does not update files in neither /var/lib/pacman/local nor /var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync . Is that a bug in pamac?
In /etc/pamac.conf I have set RefreshPeriod = 0 because I prefer using CLI instead of having the automatic update icon nagging me. When I turn on my PC in the morning I check for updates manually, that is often enough for me ; you young whippersnappers can keep your automation, you have it too easy nowadays.
@cscs thank you for reminding me of checkupdates, I will try that in the future. For convenience I have made an alias update='pamac checkupdates --aur' to check for all updates in repositories and AUR with one command that does not demand authentification with my password. I guess checkupdates does not look in AUR, as the man page for checkupdates does not mention AUR.
I cannot say I am very fond of pamac as a system maintenance tool.