[SOLVED] Glibc broke pacman after 2 months without update

Question

Hello all !
So I did an update of the system after two months.
To begin with I couldn't update because of the issue with the /lib.
Pacman was complaining that /lib was existing in the filesystem.
I used the command provided by the wiki and by some posts to update :
pacman -Syu --ignore glibc,curl
Everything went fine and 422 packages were upgraded.
But then when I tried to use pacman, I had the following error :
pacman: /lib/libc.so.6: version 'GLIBC_2.16' not found (required by /lib/libarchive.so.12)
I tried to follow several posts, and that's what I did :
- downgrade pacman (extracting the tar.xz directly in the /)
- downgrade curl (extracting the tar.xz directly in the /)
- upgrade pacman to 2.16 (downloading it on the web and extracting it directly in the /)
I still have the same problem with version 'GLIBC_2.16' not found.
When I tried to upgrade pacman to 2.16, no files were put in /lib, they were put instead to /usr/lib, so I don't see how it could have solved the problem.
Thank you for your help, I'm desperate now ! (by the way, I use yaourt)
Last edited by Sathors (2012-10-05 13:06:16)

Answer 1

WorMzy wrote:Which post? You've been told never to use --force during this update: https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-lib- … a-symlink/
The message error was different from the one about this update : https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-lib- … a-symlink/
It was that I installed glibc by extracting the tarball, and I was trying to reinstall it cleanly using pacman. It was complaining about the files of glibc already installed.
That's why I used the flag --force, only to overwrite glibc install.
WorMzy wrote:It seems to me that you're only interested in a quick fix, and aren't interested in understanding what the problem is. Coupled with the fact that you haven't updated in two months, I'm going to tentatively suggest that Arch isn't the distro for you.
Actually I am quite interested in understanding what the problem is, but even following the different posts I don't clearly get it, because I can find solutions, but not many explanations.
As for the fact that I didn't do an update in two months, it was because I had a master thesis to write, and I couldn't afford even one day of messing around with my system. So I guess I had my reasons for doing so.
I finally found the solution to be able to chroot back into my system, I simply had to delete /lib, and to symlink /usr/lib to /lib.
Now everything seems to work fine.
I am sorry if my previous posts were not clear enough, as I'm chrooting into a live usb on my desktop and using my laptop at the same time, it was hard for me to keep track of all the topics I followed.
Thank you for your help, now I'll try and solve my booting problems !