Josh Sherman
I’ve been a bad Arch Linux user recently. Even though I speak highly about being able to run the most cutting edge software, I’ve been slacking and didn’t run an update for a while.
This was primarily because I didn’t really feel like having to figure out any problems that may arise. The irony being, the longer I waited to update, the more likely I was to run into problems.
Given the recent long weekend, I figured it was well over due to update the 261 packages with pending updates that were taunting me from my GNOME top bar.
As per usual, I went ahead and blindly ran a full update without checking to see what sort of calamity awaited me.
Fortunately, things went pretty smoothly, aside from running into an issue
updating reflector due to a conflict with reflector-timer. The message in
it’s entirety went something like this:
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
reflector: /usr/lib/systemd/system/reflector.service exists in filesystem (owned by reflector-timer)
reflector: /usr/lib/systemd/system/reflector.timer exists in filesystem (owned by reflector-timer)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
error installing repo packages
I did what I normally do, and checked the Arch Linux home page to see if my particular issue was referenced in any of the recent news.
Unfortunately, it was not.
Fortunately, the error seemed to indicate that reflector was attempting to
install some stuff that was previously owned by the reflector-timer package.
Without further investigation, I jumped to the conclusion that the packages had
been merged recently.
The obvious fix would be to trash reflector-timer and try to update again. To
remove the package I ran:
yay -Rsn reflector-timer
Once removed, I ran my update again, and things worked like a charm!
Seeing as I’m already another 50+ packages behind, I’m probably going to work towards doing updates every Friday, so I have the weekend to sort any issues out. Worst case, I don’t update my backup laptop regularly (for stability!), so it’s always ready to sub in if the need arises.
