A run that held back a blocker then upgraded 214 packages printed one line and
then nothing for nearly five minutes while pacman downloaded and installed. It
looked hung, so it got killed - during pacman's uninterruptible commit phase,
which meant the packages landed but our bookkeeping never did. The menu then
kept showing a failure from a previous run on a fully up-to-date machine.
pacman, the AUR helper and flatpak now stream their output when a person is
watching, and the progress bar is left enabled for that case. Timer runs are
unchanged: quiet, --noprogressbar, everything captured in the log.
Interactivity is decided once at startup rather than tested at the point of
use. cau_pacman_flags runs inside a process substitution, so its stdout is
always a pipe and a -t 1 check there would have silently always been false.
INT/TERM/HUP now record last_result=interrupted, so a run that is stopped says
so instead of leaving the previous verdict standing.
A repo package that replaces something an installed AUR package still depends
on aborted the entire transaction, and would have done so on every subsequent
run - one stale AUR package was enough to cut a machine off from all updates
indefinitely. Observed in the wild: percona-server-clients replaces
libperconaserverclient without providing it, while heidisql-qt6-bin hard-depends
on it, blocking 213 unrelated package updates.
pacman names the offending package in its dependency errors, so it is now
extracted and passed to --ignore for one retry: the other 213 packages go
through and the blocker is reported. The hold is per-run, never written to
IgnorePkg, so it disappears by itself once upstream catches up.
The single retry is also now a bounded recovery loop, because fixing one
problem regularly uncovers the next - a conflict resolved with --ask=20 can
surface a dependency error behind it. Each remedy is applied at most once.
The held-back set is shown in the menu and notified only when it changes, so a
blocker waiting on an upstream fix does not produce the same message daily.
Also stops Enter from quitting the menu (it used to share the quit branch with
q) and swallows the tail of an escape sequence, so one arrow key redraws once
rather than three times and never closes the menu.
A root systemd service applies pacman, AUR, Flatpak and AppImage updates on
its own, gated on battery state, gaming activity and whether anybody else is
using the package system. The CLI is deliberately two switches plus status.
No user password is stored anywhere: pacman runs as root directly, and the AUR
step - which makepkg forbids running as root - drops to a locked system account
that sudoers permits to call pacman without a password.
Felitendo