I was struggling a little bit today with my system not being able to update.
I got an error about a 404 of a repo, which led me to the issue: it turned out that the [community] repo was finally disabled on the 1st of March after being deprecated for about a year. This led to issues, which made me look them up, which led me to a post about this.
My question is: is there a website/portal/minimal newsletter regarding these kinds of fundamental changes?
Or should I just accept that these changes will invariably happen, and I will simply find out about them in due time (as has happened today)?
As you probably undoubtedly know, Manjaro is not just a rolling-release distribution, but a curated rolling-release distribution. Barring urgent bug fixes and security updates to certain individual packages, updates are bundled together for both the Testing branch and the Stable Branch.
Each time a bundled update is pushed out, the Manjaro Team will publish a dedicated thread about it under the Announcements category, i.e. under Testing Updates for Manjaro Testing and under Stable Updates for Manjaro Stable. Similar categories with their own announcement threads exist for the ARM category, i.e. Testing Updates and Stable Updates.
Every update announcement thread contains two very important posts…:
The first post will list the important changes that the update brings along.
The second post will detail all of the potential problems, and how to solve them and/or work around them, as well as which potential problems may have been introduced by earlier updates, for those people who for whatever reason chose to skip an update and/or who might have missed the news.
It is imperative that one regularly logs on at the forum and subscribes to notifications for the Announcements category of the branch one is on, and it is also recommended that people on the Stable branch would periodically check the feedback on the Testing Updates and Unstable Updates threads in order to get a timely heads-up regarding any potentially incisive changes.
In addition to the above, you may also want to install matray from the extra repository. It’s a gtk-based system tray applet that will notify you of important news regarding updates.
An important aspect of all Arch-based distributions is also that an update may bring along .pacnew files. These are files with configuration changes, and it is imperative that one looks at those changes and merges them in with one’s existing configuration files, after which the pertinent .pacnew file may be deleted.
.pacnew files must not be ignored, but it is just as dangerous to blindly copy them over one’s existing configuration files. Doing so may lead to anything from mild configuration issues to being unable to log into your system.
A browser bookmark to https://forum.manjaro.org/latest will show you what troubles the common manjaro user; update-related issues will often pop up mere minutes after they are announced.
Check daily, keeps you in the loop; you even can save yourself around 3Gb/month bandwidth by turning off pamac’s ‘check for updates’.
Yes, and especially so the problems whose solution was already posted in the second post of the announcement thread, and then the 200 duplicate threads about those very same problems by all the people who didn’t bother checking the announcement or searching for similar topics.
