Pacman R7.0 Update

What’s going on ?

Recently Pacman, Arch’s package manager recieved a major upgrade to R7.0, which brought with it a ton of changes, some of which will require manual intervention.

The Changes

The new major version brings many new features, including introducing support for downloading packages as a separate user with reduced privileges.

While this enhancement improves security, users with local repositories may need to perform manual interventions to ensure seamless operation. Here’s what it’s all about.

For those utilizing local repositories, the new download user might not have the necessary access permissions to the repository files. This can prevent packages from downloading correctly.

To resolve this issue, you should assign the repository files and folders to the “alpm” group and ensure that the executable bit (“+x“) is set on the directories in question.

The group (and the user) are automatically set up during the upgrade to Pacman 7.0, so if you follow the terminal’s output, you will see the following messages:

Creating group 'alpm' with GID 946.
Creating user 'alpm' (Arch Linux Package Management) with UID 946 and GID 946.

Here’s how you can do it:

sudo chown :alpm -R /path/to/local/repo

This command changes the group ownership of your local repository files to alpm group, allowing the Pacman’s download user to access them appropriately.

Additionally, you will need to merge any .pacnew files generated during the update. These files contain new default configurations introduced with Pacman 7.0. Merging them ensures you’re using the latest settings and helps prevent potential conflicts.

Now, I have written a simple command that will do that quickly and efficiantly, while enabling some hidden features if you haven’t enabled them yet.

sudo sed -i '/^# Misc options/,/ParallelDownloads = [0-9]*/c\# Misc options\nColor\nILoveCandy\nCheckSpace\n#DisableSandbox\nDownloadUser = alpm\nDisableDownloadTimeout\nParallelDownloads = 10' /etc/pacman.conf

We are done with pacman.conf. Furthermore, Pacman 7.0 also introduces changes to improve checksum stability for Git repositories that use .gitattributes files.

Consequently, you might need to update the checksums in your PKGBUILD files that source from Git repositories. This is a one-time adjustment to accommodate the new checksum calculation method.

AUR Helpers

paru/yay: error while loading shared libraries: libalpm.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Just in case you use an AUR helper, you will need to either recompile it since libalpm.so was updated to version 15. If you are using the -git version, otherwise if you are using the normal or -bin versions you will need to wait for them to get updated. Or switch to -git (not very recommended), up to you.

Makepkg / Rust

A few other changes were introduced with this update, especially if you compile your own packages. One of the affected files is makepkg.conf which contains the flags and packager info.

Here’s how you can merge the changes :

diff -u /etc/makepkg.conf /etc/makepkgconf.pacnew > diff.patch

This creates a file called diff.patch with the differences in a unified format, which is more readable and suitable for merging.

Apply the patch (diff) to the makepkg.conf file using the patch command:

sudo patch /etc/makepkg.conf < diff.patch

Last file to be affected, is rust.conf under /etc/makepkg.conf.d/. To merge changes, follow the same steps mentioned earlier for makepkg.conf replacing the file path and name to the ones of rust.conf.

Wrapping up

Pacman doesn’t get updated very often and when it does, there will always be some manual intervention of sorts. Also since AUR Helpers kinda rely on it, if you can’t wait for maintainers to update stable version, install -git one, not always the best recourse as those can break at any moment. Instead, I would highly recommend, if you really want to install packages from the AUR, to do it without the use of a helper, like so:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/packagename.git
cd packagename/ && makepkg -si

Also if you are using any GUI Packages Managers you will also need to either recompile them or wait for them to get updated. It’s the nature of Rolling release Distros.

If you want to learn more about how to use Pacman and become a pro, I would highly recommend This Awesome Guide by @Linuxiac.

I hope this helps y’all…