Asked what happens if someone shuts the laptop down mid-update, the honest
answer turned out to be poor. The inhibitor does stop them - logind refuses and
falls back to org.freedesktop.login1.power-off-ignore-inhibit, which is
auth_admin_keep - so the desktop answers with an administrator password prompt
reading "Power off the system while an application is inhibiting this". systemd
ships that string untranslated, it never mentions updates, and no KDE catalog
contains any shutdown-blocked text at all. Only systemctl names the reason.
So a notification now goes out before the transaction, asking for the machine to
be left on. Notifications gained a tag: the result replaces the start message in
place rather than stacking a second, contradictory bubble beside it.
Tagged notifications also carry a queue flag. "An update is starting" is only
meaningful while somebody is looking, so unlike the result it is not spooled for
delivery at next login.
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.
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