Recover from a pacman lock left behind by a power cut

A machine switched off mid-update leaves /var/lib/pacman/db.lck behind. Nothing
removed it, so every subsequent run deferred on it - one power cut would have
stopped updates permanently and silently, which on an unattended machine is the
worst outcome there is.

A lock older than the current boot is provably abandoned: no process that could
hold it still exists. Those are now removed and the interrupted upgrade is
repeated, with pacman reinstalling anything caught half-written. A lock that is
merely unheld within the same boot stays untouched and is only reported, since
removing it could corrupt a live transaction; the boot-time test is what makes
the difference between a proof and a guess. A fuser check is kept alongside it
so a backwards clock jump cannot make a live lock look abandoned.

Documented what each layer can actually promise: suspend and normal shutdown
are blocked by the existing inhibitor, a hard power-off cannot be prevented by
anything, and snap-pac's pre/post snapshots remain the backstop.
This commit is contained in:
Felitendo committed 2026-08-08 15:40:07 +02:00
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@@ -100,6 +100,26 @@ running are skipped.
The machine is never restarted automatically. When a kernel update makes a
restart necessary, a notification says so.
# INTERRUPTED UPDATES
While a transaction is running, *cachy-auto-update* holds a
*systemd-inhibit*(1) lock on _sleep_ and _shutdown_ in blocking mode, so a
suspend, a lid close or a normal shutdown request cannot cut it short.
A hard power-off - holding the power button, or losing mains power - is not
preventable. On the next run a leftover _/var/lib/pacman/db.lck_ is removed if
it is older than the current boot, since no process able to hold it can still
exist; the upgrade is then repeated and pacman reinstalls whatever was caught
half-written. A lock file that is unheld but was created during the current
boot is reported rather than removed, because there is no way to prove it is
abandoned.
Without that recovery a single power cut would leave a lock that makes every
subsequent run defer, silently stopping updates for good.
On Btrfs with *snapper*(8) and *snap-pac*, each pacman transaction is bracketed
by a pre and post snapshot, so a broken upgrade remains rollbackable.
# FILES
_/etc/cachy-auto-update/cachy-auto-update.conf_