A bit confused about how -Suy works... Any help?

Question

I'm new to Arch, I've been using it for the past one or two months.
I have been doing "pacman -Suy" every day now and everything went fine.
Yesterday, Gnome 2.24 came through. So, I installed it. I noticed today that many parts of GNOME 2.24 have not been installed correctly. For example:
-> The deskbar applet was not there
-> The hamster-applet was not there
-> The Dwell-click applet was not there
Mostly, stuff belonging to gnome-extra meta.
When i decided to "pacman -Sy gnome-extra", it told me that it was going to "reinstall" and NOT upgrade all the corresponding packages because they were all up-to-date (some of them were not present on my system), but then again told me to download some 27MB of packages. So I decided to proceed with the install and, lo and behold, eveything checks out OK.
I'm baffled. Shouldn't "pacman -Suy" had upgraded everything the first time? I mean, check that gnome-extra was new and so re-install it with the new packages? What is going on here? Are there any more metas like gnome-extra that I should be upgrading by hand?
P.S. Note: I'm using Pacman-color v3.2.1.b instead of pacman. Could this be responsible?
Thanks!

Answer 1

iphitus wrote:pacman -Syuyuyuyuyuyuyu works equally well
Not equally... that will force a database refresh.
Here's a script (Python for a change ) that can check if a locally installed group is complete or not. If not, it will list the packages that are missing. If you pass it group names as arguments, only those groups will be checked. If you don't pass it any arguments, all groups found locally will be checked. Be careful in how you interpret this because you might have installed a package that belongs to a group and it might tell you that xx packages belonging to that group were not found on your computer. Obviously, if you haven't installed the group, that's what you'd expect.
The script does not install or update anything. It only displays some info. Save it as "group_checker.py" and make it executable. To check "gnome" and "gnome-extra", invoke as follows:
group_checker.py gnome gnome-extra
group_checker.py
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import os
import re
from sets import Set
from string import join
local_group_cmd = 'pacman -Qg'
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
local_group_cmd += " %s" % arg
local_group_list = os.popen(local_group_cmd).read().rstrip()
if len(local_group_list) == 0:
exit()
regex = re.compile('(\S+)\s+(\S+)')
local_group_dictionary = {}
for line in local_group_list.split("\n"):
(group,pkg) = regex.search(line).group(1,2)
if local_group_dictionary.has_key(group):
local_group_dictionary[group].add(pkg)
else:
local_group_dictionary[group] = Set([pkg])
sync_group_cmd = 'pacman -Sg ' + join(local_group_dictionary.keys())
sync_group_list = os.popen(sync_group_cmd).read().rstrip()
sync_group_dictionary = {}
for line in sync_group_list.split("\n"):
(group,pkg) = regex.search(line).group(1,2)
if sync_group_dictionary.has_key(group):
sync_group_dictionary[group].add(pkg)
else:
sync_group_dictionary[group] = Set([pkg])
for group in local_group_dictionary.keys():
missing_pkgs = sync_group_dictionary[group].difference(local_group_dictionary[group])
if len(missing_pkgs) == 0:
print "%s is complete" % group
else:
print "%s contains the following %d package(s) not found on your system" % (group, len(missing_pkgs))
for pkg in missing_pkgs:
print "\t%s" % pkg