I just wondered if pacman -S pacman would work and it said it was successful. Now I have pacman 6 instead of 5.2.2-1 but it seems to have got unlinked from libarchive or wherever archive_entry_digest is. ldd /usr/bin/pacman shows libalpm and libarchive upgraded to 13. I can't do anything with pacman now. How does one upgrade pacman then: not pacman -S pacman, I guess.

If you entered pacman -S pacman and got another version of pacman, then you had/have a partially updated box. And that comes from pacman -Sy. You updated pacmans database without updating the whole box. The next time you run pacman -S, you get software that does not match the libraries etc. that is already on the box.

I assume that you were holding pacman back for some reason and just now decided to update it? You can't update one package on arch. You are suppose to update the whole box together so that everything matches.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=95007
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman

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I admire how you deduced I used "pacman -Sy", teckk, and you're correct. I see that pacman -Sy could lead to me installing new stuff based on dependencies I haven't upgraded yet. So if I use "pacman -Sy" the onus is on me to run ldd and upgrade the dependencies first whenever I install a new package, sure wish I had in this case.

The truth is I don't believe in updating reams of software on a daily basis and that's the main reason I abandoned Windows. The thought of all the mainly unnecessary traffic from millions of users keeping their systems up to date reminds me of our car culture poisoning the air without conscience. That's why I use minimal systems like Crux and LFS.

Thanks for your pointers on pacman, teckk: I'll take them on board.

I don't update my arch boxes everyday either. I sometimes go 3 months between updates. Read the arch news to see what it happening. Done it that way for 10 or so years now.

I also download packages once, on the machine with the most software, to a temp directory on that machine, pacman -Syuw <somehwere>, then share that temp directory with all other arch machines on the network, copy those packages to the pacman cache on each machine, and run pacman -Syu on it. Since all of the packages needed for an update are already in its pacman cache, it may not need to download any more packages. I then move those packages from the temp dir on the first machine into its pacman cache and update it. Since pacman 6 you need the sig files too.

The all intel machines don't need anything else. I have a couple of machines with a broadcom device...one has an nvidia device, those 2 machine will download 3 or 4 more packages.

If you wait 3 months the updates might be 700MB, but, you can share that with 6 or 8 machines and that doesn't seem so bad.

What you need to do right now is pacman -Syu Then, you can install what you want with pacman -S <package> for as long as you want. Of course, as time passes, the packages won't be available on the mirror anymore because...it's a rolling release.

You don't have to update every day or every week. Although that might be smart.

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I'd like to run "pacman -Syu", teckk, but I can't because of "undefined symbol archive_entry_digest" which isn't in my system or in the pacman 6 archive when I unpack it into a sandbox. I was going to try to install it again from there but all the files are the same so seems a waste of effort.

Seems like pacman 6 is still linked to libarchive.so.12 even though it just installed libarchive.so.13 but it must be because I did "pacman -Sy".