Pamac-cli and pamac-manager unreliable

[denilsonsa]

@soundofthunder

Or, rather, the update didn’t complete due to the crash, and libalpm (and pacman and/or pamac related packages) failed as a result – a classic incomplete update scenario.

That is what you meant to suggest, is it not?

No, not that at all.

The last time it crashed for me, the list of packages to-be-updated/being-updated did NOT include any pacman/pamac-related package.

Additionally, pamac crashed, but the updated continued happening in the background. I could observe on my network monitor that packages were still being downloaded, and aterwards I could observe high CPU and I/O activity by monitoring in htop. After several minutes, the update was completed, which I could confirm by reopening pamac and seeing it shows zero remaining updates. (Well, maybe not zero, because it would show up pending AUR updates.)

And these are the main problems:

1. Pamac crashes. It shouldn’t. (But I understand this can be tricky to fix.)
2. It leaves the user with not feedback whatsoever that the update has continued in the background. I believe there should be at least some “safety net” fallback code that should trigger upon crashing, and that would provide bare-bones minimalistic feedback to the user until the update is finished.

Previous messages about the same issue:

• [Stable Update] 2025-02-04 - Kernels, KDE, XFCE, Mesa, Cosmic, Systemd - #56 by denilsonsa
• [Stable Update] 2025-02-04 - Kernels, KDE, XFCE, Mesa, Cosmic, Systemd - #65 by denilsonsa
• [Stable Update] 2025-02-04 - Kernels, KDE, XFCE, Mesa, Cosmic, Systemd - #124 by MarMJ
• [Stable Update] 2025-05-19 - Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE Gear, KDE Frameworks - #56 by denilsonsa
• [Stable Update] 2025-05-19 - Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE Gear, KDE Frameworks - #63 by denilsonsa

That’s why I have once suggested:

@denilsonsa

Suggestions:

1. pamac-manager should not crash.
2. In case it crashes, it should recover from it.
3. In case it crashes, it should probably/maybe abort the background update.
4. If the user re-launches the GUI after it has crashed, it should query background processes to figure out an update is already in progress and it should give feedback to the user.
5. If rebooting a machine during an update causes the system to become unbootable… Maybe the update should be more resilient and more atomic. It should survive an interruption. It is a common problem, and it shouldn’t be a problem.

@denilsonsa

There could be some crash handling code that would open a bare-bones window with tail -f pacman.log. That would at least give feedback to the user that work is still being done in the background.

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@linux-aarhus

I did some research once on why pamac was eating memory which ultimately lead to crashes on low-spec systems

Definitely not my case. 32GB of RAM, and I constantly look at the RAM usage in a KDE Plasma panel. Plenty of memory available, nothing that even remotely looks like OOM at all.