Three stretches of a run had no way to report anything, and the bar
handled each of them badly.
pacman prints nothing at all between "starting full system upgrade" and
the transaction it eventually prepares. On a 161-package backlog that
silence ran to three minutes and nineteen seconds, and the bar spent all
of it frozen on "0 of 161" - a counter seeded from checkupdates before
there was anything to count. Working out the upgrade is now a step of its
own, with a label and deliberately no item count, because the number was
the part that was lying.
A step that turns out to have no work is dropped from the bar instead of
being handed its share for nothing. Packages already in the cache are
never announced by pacman, so a run that only has to unpack used to jump
thirty points the moment unpacking started; the same went for AUR with
nothing pending and for machines with no Gear Lever or no Flatpaks.
pacman's output is line-buffered through stdbuf. Writing to a log rather
than a terminal, libc released it in 4KB blocks - around a hundred and
sixty "upgrading foo..." lines at a time - so the bar sat still and then
leapt to the end of the step in one poll.
What is left is work whose length genuinely cannot be known: resolving a
transaction, and an AUR helper compiling for a quarter of an hour. Those
now creep along a curve that approaches the end of their step without
reaching it. The item counter stays put throughout - it is the field that
would be lying if it moved - and any real report overtakes the creep. A
bar that has not moved since it appeared is read as a hang, and somebody
who reads it that way reaches for the power button mid-update.
The bar is also monotonic now. Dropping a step rescales the run, and the
conflict-recovery loop restarts pacman and its tally from the top; both
are honest, neither is a reason to show a bar that retreats.
The headline read "Paketquellen" over KDE's own "0 von 123 Elementen" -
two nouns and a count, with nothing anywhere saying that the machine was
updating itself. Nobody goes looking for this entry; it turns up beside
whatever they were doing, so it has to explain itself in one line.
Each step now says so outright: "Systempakete werden aktualisiert",
"Flatpak-Programme werden aktualisiert", and so on.
The count line underneath belongs to Plasma, which only counts in bytes,
files, dirs or items - "Paketen" is not on offer, so "Elementen" stays,
now under a headline that says what is being counted.
An unattended run takes twenty minutes and said nothing at all while it worked.
The notification area now carries a live entry for the duration - which step is
running, which package is being unpacked, item count, percentage. It is a job
in the sense of org.kde.JobViewServer, the same mechanism Dolphin uses while
copying files, rather than a notification, which is what makes it a real bar
instead of a line of text.
That mechanism needs a process of its own. The desktop ties a job to the D-Bus
connection that requested it and withdraws it the moment that connection
closes, so gdbus, busctl and dbus-send cannot drive one at all - every
invocation is a fresh connection that closes again immediately. A small helper
therefore runs inside each graphical session for the length of the update,
holding the connection open and taking instructions on stdin. It needs
python-gobject; without it there is no bar and nothing else changes. Position
within the repository step is read from pacman's own "(120/260) upgrading foo"
lines. Its other (n/m) sequences are ignored on purpose: checking keys, package
integrity and loading files each count up to the same total, and following them
would run the bar to the end three times before the first package was unpacked.
The "system updated" notification never arrived, which is what prompted looking
at any of this. Tagged notifications were posted with --replace-id naming the
start message, and Plasma silently drops a Notify() whose replaces_id points at
an expired notification: no bubble, no error, and the id it hands back is the
dead one it just ignored. The start bubble times out in seconds and a run lasts
minutes, so the result fell into exactly that hole every single time. The
previous message is now withdrawn and a fresh one posted.
How long a message stays is set per message rather than left to the daemon.
Anything reporting that the machine still needs a person - a failed update, a
locked package database, packages that had to be held back - waits until it is
dismissed. Everything else times out on its own, a successful update included;
nothing should have to be clicked away for having gone right. Daemons do keep
critical-urgency messages up and the specification asks them to, but that is a
should, it says nothing about the normal-urgency messages here that still need
somebody to act, and urgency separately governs sound and do-not-disturb.
"Restart recommended" is gone, and NotifyReboot with it. The running kernel
loses its module tree the moment pacman unpacks the new one, so the notice
fired while the run was still building AUR packages and pulling Flatpaks, where
it reads as an invitation to restart in the middle of an update. The state is
still recorded and cachy-auto-update status still reports it. The option went
rather than only its default, because an installed system keeps its own
configuration file and would have carried on notifying regardless.
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