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News: Manual intervention required
Generally, always read the news before upgrading/updating.
always read the news before updates. There was one that said manual intervention was needed, and gave you the exact command you needed to run
I only read it when I get error like this to know what I shouldn't do. Is that acceptable? Always checking the news seems superfluous because most times it goes smoothly, and packman will fail and let you know if it can't do something.
I use this approach and there's never been an unrecoverable situation over the decade plus I've used Arch Linux.
to be fair this didn't break thne system either. It refused to update until you followed all 1 instructions
I've learnt to check the endeavouros forum before a kernel update (normal updates are fine), it can save you from having to chroot and tweak stuff... It takes 5 minutes to check against 2 hours to fix
Uninstall the existing versions of whatever you have installed, then install the new version again.
The package archnews2 also provides an arch news reader. This issue was also announced in Arch forums before it was rolled out - I saw it in Lemmy.
But, yeah, you really do have to read archnews release notes. Frankly, it annoys me a bit - pacman should have the concept of breaking changes and show related news before upgrades. I think one of the news packages (maybe archnews2?) has a config setting that always displays news before upgrades, but it's only annoying because it is ignorant of whether the news item affects any given system, so it's often just noise; I think I turned it off because it kept showing me the same news every time.
It's the worst part of Arch, and it's poorly handled. I don't know of a rolling release that handles informing the user of, breaking changes better, though.
I’ve set everything up where I get news when there’s one. There’s like one news post every two months or so. I can deal with that “noise”.
The good thing is it fails properly. This should not continue because it would break your system. The package ownership of those files has changed but the package manager would have to remove the current owning package then install the new owning package after in two separate transactions. Technically this could be make possible I think it would lead to bad packaging and would be bad practice. Happily it fails loudly and makes next steps fairly clear.
This is what got me to switch several systems to tumbleweed. Yes I can read update notifications. No I don't want to constantly.
Just recently mkv playback started crashing under arch too. Another breaking update.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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