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.
CleanCache was off, so nothing ever pruned /var/cache/pacman/pkg - 23 GB on the
machine this was found on, with three 3.2 GB copies of one package. Trimming
only drops older versions of installed packages and cached versions of
uninstalled ones, so the cost is downgrade depth, not working software.
flatpak uninstall --unused moves from CleanCache to RemoveOrphans, where it
belongs: unused runtimes are the Flatpak equivalent of orphaned packages, and
removing installed software should not hide behind a flag named for cache
trimming. RemoveOrphans stays off - 'orphaned' only means nothing depends on
it, which is also true of something installed deliberately.
The log now reports what a trim reclaimed, since a real paccache run says
almost nothing and there was otherwise no way to tell it was working.
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