OSNews

After having had a relatively trouble-free experience with FreeBSD for one and a half year, I decided to try out Arch about five weeks ago. I nearly gave up on it a couple of times because my system was foobared after a pacman -Syu. It's happened every couple of weeks.

I've used Arch fulltime for at least a year now, and I can't say that I have the same experience with -Syu foobaring my system as you describe.

So I can't help asking myself, "why do some people have so much problems with sysupgrades, even though they probably use less TURs and homebuilt packages than me?"

There are surely more than one reason for this. One that comes to mind is the fact that I use neither Gnome nor KDE, but what I wanted to stress here is that you must make sure you know when pacman has overwritten a config file. When you do a sysupgrade, don't just run pacman -Syu and close your eyes. Pay attention to the output the command gives. I don't know if this might be related to your problems, so don't be offended if you already know how to treat pacman.

The config files that the package maintainer believes to be ok to edit, are flagged for backup on upgrade. Pacman will save these with suffix .pacsave and overwrite the old files. Whenever you get a warning that this has happened, you probably need to take some action. Compare the old and the new file, and make sure the one you put into duty is correct. Also note that if you upgrade the same package twice without copying from or moving the backups, the first .pacsave will be overwritten by the second, meaning that your original configs will be forever lost. Files that are not supposed to be edited, are quietly overwritten. This is very important to know.

Cheers,
-bogomipz