Updating a single package - how does mhwd work?

[reikdas]

I had stopped regularly updating all packages on my system since the past few months (and only updated the occasional package which I needed a particular version of).

I tried to update only the python-lark-parser package - pamac didn’t let me since it complained about needing a mhwd update, so I tried with pacman -S python-lark-parser. This is a rather simple and self contained package, so I was surprised when pacman started to update mhwd and my nvidia drivers with this command.

How does mhwd work? Does it make pamac try to solve the entire package tree before updating single packages? Is updating single packages not a tenable solution?

[bogdancovaciu]

@reikdas

I had stopped regularly updating all packages on my system since the past few months

Partial updates are not supported. It might work for a while for a couple of packages, but then you will lose control of dependencies or break the install.

@reikdas

How does mhwd work?

Is a collection of scripts for GPU drivers detection and kernel. The legacy drivers got dropped. Is using pacman and not pamac.

[reikdas]

@bogdancovaciu

@reikdas

I had stopped regularly updating all packages on my system since the past few months

Partial updates are not supported. It might work for a while for a couple of packages, but then you will lose control of dependencies or break the install.

Could you explain why that is? Ideally, dependency versions would be specified in the PKGBUILD and then pacman would be able to solve dependency issues or complain about conflicts.

@bogdancovaciu

@reikdas

How does mhwd work?

Is a collection of scripts for GPU drivers detection and kernel. The legacy drivers got dropped. Is using pacman and not pamac.

Since I wasn’t using a legacy driver (450xx before the update), I am still a little confused why mhwd and my nvidia drivers would start being updated when I tried to update just python-lark-parser.

[bogdancovaciu]

@reikdas

dependency versions would be specified in the PKGBUILD

One package may depend on other packages being up to date, so you should hold back all dependencies if that was your goal, resulting in a point release system, not rolling.

@reikdas

Since I wasn’t using a legacy driver

Regardless. mhwd will update the mhwd related nvidia scripts and database even on a system that doesn’t have an nvidia GPU. That script will not be triggered to install the driver anyway, but mhwd depends on other packages to be up to date or is required by other packages to be updated to latest version.

[reikdas]

@bogdancovaciu

One package may depend on other packages being up to date, so you should hold back all dependencies if that was your goal,

If a package I want to update to a specific version, needs its dependencies to be updated, which in turn results in other packages being updated I don’t mind. It was just curious that updating python-lark-parser somehow required pacman to do something with nvidia.