System Maintenance
General Recommendation
Quote from Arch Wiki
Partial updates/upgrades are unsupported
Arch Linux [Manjaro] is a rolling release distribution. That means when new library versions are pushed to the repos, all developers and packagers, rebuild all packages against the libraries. For example, if two packages depend on the same library, upgrading only one package might also upgrade library (as a dependency), which might then break the other package which depends on an older version of the library.
That is why partial upgrades are not supported. do not use
pacman -Sy [package]
or any equivalent such aspacman -Sy
followed bypacman -S [package]
. Always upgrade (withpacman -Syu
) before installing a package. Be very careful when usingIgnorePkg
andIgnoreGroup
for the same reason. If the system has locally installed packages (such as AUR packages), users will need to rebuild them when their dependices recieve a soname bump.If a partial upgrade scenario has been created, and binaries are broken because they cannot find the libraries they are linked against, do not "fix" the problem simply by symlinking. Libraries receive soname bumps when they are not backwards compatible. A simple
pacman -Syu
to a properly synced mirror will fix the problem as long as pacman is not broken.The bash script checkupdates, included with the pacman package, provides a safe way to check for upgrades to installed packages without running a system update at the same time.
Act on alerts during an upgrade
When upgrading the system, be sure to pay attention to the alert notices provided by pacman. If any additional actions are required by the user, be sure to take care of them right away. If a pacman alert is confusing, search the forums and the recent news posts for more detailed instructions.
Deal promptly with new configuration files
When pacman is invoked,
.pacnew
and.pacsave
files can be created. Pacman provides notice when this happens and users must deal with these files promptly. Users are referred to the Pacman/Pacnew and Pacsave wiki page for detailed instructions.Also, think about other configuration files you may have copied or created. If a package had an example configuration that you copied to your home directory, check to see if a new one has been created.
Manjaro Recommandation
In addition to the above mentioned points, Archlinux has only one branch, Manjaro has three.
Always follow these Manjaro recommendations:
- No temporary branch changes. Do not mix in packages from other branches.
- After changes to branch and mirror list do a full system update
sudo pacman -Syyu
- Before installing new packages do a full system update
sudo pacman -Syu [some-package-name]
- Do not downgrade using the pacman downgrade switch (-Suu).
Additional information
Arch Linux Wiki