This is more of a complaint than an issue. I’m just venting here.
In the past month I’ve experienced two issues where the pacman cache becomes corrupted. I don’t get any errors but I notice that something is wrong is the Notifier stops alerting me to any updates. What concerns me that the update process does not provide any indication that an issue exists.
I’m not sure if this is a Manjaro issue or a pacman issue. But, if it happens again I will have to ditch Manjaro.
For others that might experience this issue, the fix for pacman is the remove all of the cached package files from /var/lib/pacman/local and then let pacman recache all of those files again.
To remove all cached package files run:
sudo pacman -Sc
To re-down and re-cache the package files run:
sudo pacman -Syy
I’ve had some frustrations with pacman myself in the past and it seemed like often times it was down to the mirror I was using. Something wasn’t syncing properly on their end and it was interfering with the caching process. No idea if that’s true for you but I changed mirrors and don’t seem to have those issues anymore. Other than that, I would say to take a look at the Manjaro forums. There are some incredibly helpful people over there and 9 times out of 10, when I go looking for an answer someone has already run into and fixed the issue. Hope you can get it fixed.
The information I posted came from a DDG search, I don’t know enough about Arch or pacman to confirm if it was worded correctly or not, but running the cmds listed above did correct the issue.
The issue isn’t with any notification about those specific files, the issue is the lack of notification that there were security updates.
Case in point. The recent Firefox remote code vulnerability. I waited 3 days for Manjaro to notify me that there was a security update for Firefox. I never got that notification. I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. I discovered the issue reported above when I attempted a manual update.
The fact that there were over 300 updates that I was not notified about is what concerns me.
I do agree that the GUI package manager should have alerted you of an issue caused by corrupt databases. Maybe you can post an issue on it’s gitlab page to help out the dev?
I’m not sure if the problem (from your description) is Manjaro as such as I’ve had similar/the same problems with ArcoLinux and EndeavourOS, (yes, I have all 3 installed on partitions of my Thinkpad X240).
I put it down to part of the joys of using Arch based distros, worked around it (didn’t check forums or anything, just fiddled about until the problems went away).
Personally, it’s not a big deal for me because these installs are not critical, just for playing with and if I have to nuke and restart, that’s part of the fun. It is however a reason why I couldn’t in all conscience suggest someone new to Linux start with even Manjaro, good as it is.
I am also convinced it is a pacman/libalpm problem.
But Pamac should inform the user about it not being able to sync databases because of corrupt files.
But I think the underlying issue is with libalpm, since pacman itself has the same issue. And both pacman and Pamac or just frontends for libalpm, which does the actual package management system.
I did know about pacaur (but then I’ve not dabbled with the AUR as I’ve not needed to much for my simple needs).
I do find the need for 2 command line package management tools, (3 if you include yay), to be odd, not to mention the unintuitive syntax of them (yeah, I’ve seen people tout the virtues of short keyboard commands and option, I remain unconvinced).
Just thought I’d throw out that I’ve had a particularly good experience with yay lately. I like the utility of it searching both the standard repos and AUR. It handles AUR in a more logical way to me. Not trying to overload the conversation but thought it might be something of use to you.
Whenever I have this problem it is a mirror that continues to provide a or some corrupt package(s). I usually refresh mirrors by using sudo pacman-mirrors --geoip and delete everything in /var/cache/pacman/pkg, then run the upgrade again and it usually works.