Today my KDE Plasma Desktop installation started showing the following when doing pacman -Syu:
warning: glib2: local (2.74.0-2) is newer than core (2.74.0-1.0)
I already saw several posts of those and they suggested it can happen with unstable or if you installed packages manually but that isn’t the case for me.
My Desktop system is using stable. I installed from an release ISO and only did pacman -Syu ever since. I am not sure if I saw this in the past.
I also updated the mirrors as some people suggested but that wasn’t it.
I have seen this way more often on my PinePhone. I got my Beta Edition and have only updated it with pacman -Syu. This is using arm-stable.
Like a comment suggested it seems like packages are being pushed to stable and pulled/downgraded on the server side afterwards. It could also be the case that the version after the - is not properly handled in some internal paths and is not detecting it as a newer version (IIRC correctly on PinePhone it always differed on that version).
What’s a bit problematic about this is, that you are only seeing this when using pacman but not with Discover so people might not even be aware that they have to “fix” something. So far I have not been aware of any issue caused by this but in theory it cause an issue as mentioned in Phone no longer working - "locker is broken and unlocking is not possible" - #10 by brennana.
On my PinePhone I have fixed these issues by re-installing the packages. But I have an inverted case of that issue there. pacman says everything is up-to-date but Discover tells me there is an update for a package is available (kpeoplevcard: 0.1-1 -> 0.1-1.7). But that update doesn’t exist and I get an error about it.
@maycne.sonahoz
There’s still the issue that Discover doesn’t handle this properly which is probably what most of the people will see. Just because you are running/knowing Linux doesn’t mean you have to mess with the shell/underlying command.
Also pulling a released version and going back to previous one just seems so wrong. The previous version should be pushed out with a version bump.
That might be intended to be a temporary workaround until the newer version has been fixed and will be pushed again but I have seen such messages on PinePhone persist for weeks/months so it seems some packages will remain in their “broken” state forever.
Also as stated above I still have such a package but in Discover only. Has been like that for months now.
I didn’t know about pacman -Syuu. Thanks for pointing that out.
Discover not being able to handle downgrades is not something we can do much about.
Packages can be downgraded in the repository for many reasons. The most common reason for us (in Manjaro ARM) is that we have been maintaining the package for a long while and so have accumulated a few pkgrel updates a long the way. Then at some point it starts getting packaged by Arch Linux upstream, making our package not needed anymore and they always start at pkgrel=1.
If you start seeing some of the “local is newer than xxxx” messages in pacman, doing a sudo pacman -Syuu is usually a good idea to be inline with the repo. Especially when it’s a package (like kpeoplevcard) that have a slow release cycle. kpeoplevcard was tagged 0.1 on December 5th 2019 (almost 3 years ago) and has not had a tag since.
❯ pacman -Si discover | grep 'packagekit-qt5'
Optional Deps : packagekit-qt5: to manage packages from Arch Linux repositories (not recommended, use at your own risk)
Well, the issue is that Discover is the default updater and packager on the PinePhone (on the current Beta Edition, even out of factory) and is just too broken to be useful (see Discover system updates still very unreliable). As an experienced GNU/Linux user, I can fix the issues it caused for me, but even for me, it is just too broken to be useful and I have basically switched to pacman on the CLI. (I basically had to always do that after a Discover system upgrade anyway, so I figured I might as well use the CLI to begin with and avoid the painful to recover breakage.)
I have been wanting to try out pamac-gtk with pamac-mobile-integration for a while, now that GTK is no longer semi-broken on Plasma Mobile (see the fixed bug 452967 – kwin_wayland: touch input does not reach GTK or Chromium popup menus (subsurfaces)), but have not yet. But what is sure is that Discover is just not a workable solution as long as nobody feels responsible for upstream maintenance of the PackageKit alpm backend. (Hint: PackageKit upstream considers it the distribution’s job to maintain its respective PackageKit backend in upstream PackageKit, so someone from Arch, from Manjaro, or from any other Arch derivative needs to take care of it or it will remain broken forever. Filing it off as an upstream issue is not going to work. Either you find someone who does the work, or you need to stop shipping a PackageKit-based package manager by default.)
Oh, I totally forgot about the missing support for system updates in Discover.
And good to know it’s not just me. PinePhone has been such a mess for me from the beginning so I rarely /report follow up on things since they just keep piling up and I just don’t have the drive to do so.
For what it’s worth, pamac-gtk with pamac-mobile-integration is usable on Plasma Mobile now. (It uses popup menus, so it indeed was not usable before the KWin fix, but it is now.) Scrolling is a bit messy, as in all GTK applications (not sure what to blame for that), but otherwise it seems to work. But I have not yet tried a system upgrade with it, I am waiting for the next stable update.