[SOLVED] pacman says all up-to-date for 2 months now, firefox declares itself seriously out-of-date

porphyry5 · 02-09-2018, 04:03 PM

Spent 6 weeks in Mexico, late November - early January, during which period my system update commands

Code:

date &> pacman.log
sudo pacman -Syyu --noconfirm &>> pacman.log

began returning this report

Code:

Fri Feb  9 12:21:23 PST 2018
:: Synchronizing package databases...
downloading core.db...
downloading extra.db...
downloading community.db...
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

Meanwhile firefox now persistently opens up with a message at top of window declaring itself to be seriously out of date.

I tried forcing the reinstallation of all my optional software with

Code:

sudo pacman -Syyu list-of-pkg-names

Most of them declared already up-to-date but some did not and installed the latest version, which did shut firefox up for a while but now it has started complaining out-of-date again.

Researching the problem on the web I first tried this solution as it was the most recent

Code:

  sudo pacman -S reflector rsync curl
  sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak
  sudo reflector --verbose -l 50 -p http --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

which made no difference to the performance of 'pacman -Syyu'.

Next I used the mirror-list generator athttps://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/
which produced the same results as reflector above, that is

Code:

error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.epiphyte.network : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from ca.us.mirror.archlinux-br.org : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from arch.mirror.constant.com : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.hackingand.coffee : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'community.db' from mirror.hackingand.coffee : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed to update community (unexpected error)
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

In other words, every item in the mirrorlist is rejected for Error 404, and hence there is nothing to do, because it does not find any site to do it with.

While in Mexico, I changed only my time-zone and then restored it to Los_Angeles on my return. Suggestions?

ChuangTzu · 02-09-2018, 04:17 PM

try to refresh your mirror list:
https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/

then attempt to update/upgrade again.

what version of Firefox do you have? It should be v58 something for Arch.?

You can also try to clean your package cache, note this will remove all packages other then currently installed so you will not be able to downgrade a package immediately.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._package_cache

Ref:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman

ondoho · 02-09-2018, 05:17 PM

maybe the databases got corrupted?
i never had that, but i guess you could try renaming them and start from scratch.
though it does sound more like a mirror problem.
have you checked that reflector replaced mirrorlist (does it clobber) with sane data? i.e., manually check 3 top servers or so?

porphyry5 · 02-10-2018, 01:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChuangTzu

try to refresh your mirror list:
https://www.archlinux.org/mirrorlist/

then attempt to update/upgrade again.

what version of Firefox do you have? It should be v58 something for Arch.?

You can also try to clean your package cache, note this will remove all packages other then currently installed so you will not be able to downgrade a package immediately.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._package_cache

Ref:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman

There are 3 methods given by Arch for refreshing mirrorlist, I've used them all. They each produce the same result. I've also used 'pacman -Scc' to clean out the cache. My firefox is v56.0., very old.

What I'm going to do now is uninstall all my optional software and install it again from scratch. If that doesn't work I'll do a complete system install. Thank you for your help.

porphyry5 · 02-10-2018, 01:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ondoho

maybe the databases got corrupted?
i never had that, but i guess you could try renaming them and start from scratch.
though it does sound more like a mirror problem.
have you checked that reflector replaced mirrorlist (does it clobber) with sane data? i.e., manually check 3 top servers or so?

There are 3 methods of refreshing mirrorlist given by Arch. I've used them all, they all produce sane output, which all produce the same result with pacman.

Something for sure is corrupted, but I renamed '/var/lib/pacman/sync' and created an empty sync directory. pacman simply recreated the 4 .db files in sync and gave me the same result, 'Nothing to do'.

I'm goin to uninstall all my optional apps and freshly install them. If that fails I'll do a complete system reinstall. Thank you for your help.

ondoho · 02-10-2018, 03:29 PM

you could show us your pacman config files.
you could try renaming them and try to start from scratch.
you could go through all your package directories:

Code:

cd /var &amp;&amp; find -name pacman
./abs/core/pacman
./lib/pacman
./cache/pacman

and see if something is fishy.
you could read bbs.archlinux threads or archwiki for help.

porphyry5 · 03-09-2018, 11:56 AM

I set pacman to update automatically, --no-confirm option, and to send all its messages to a .log file. Perhaps not such a good idea, as this link explains: https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-end-of-i686-support/ Did fresh installs with amd64 and everything is fine.