Yaourt fails "error: failed to prepare transaction (unexpected error)"

Question

Today, I am trying to do a full system upgrade using yaourt, but I get this strange message:
[christian@pb-tj72 ~]$ yaourt -Syua
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
error: failed to prepare transaction (unexpected error)
:: Starting full system upgrade...
It makes me wonder that it first reports the error and then executes the full system upgrade.
I hope that this is a well-known problem or that somebody can help me with instructions regarding how to increase verbosity or which log files to look at.
Otherwise, will the yaourt-alternatives work with the AUR packages that I've already installed with yaourt?
BR,
Christian

Answer 1

SS4 wrote:I'd imagine yaourt has a -v switch for verbose
I tried yaourt -Syuv (didn't work together with the '-a' switch). First I got error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root., but when running as sudo, it works. This makes me wonder whether the -v switch is undocumented or if it invokes pacman instead.
pstree -a shows me that in fact, yaourt -Syuv launches pacman -Syuv
nbvcxz wrote:Please find if you have some packages installed with "unsatisfied" dependences (eg. pulseaudio but no rtkit or libreoffice but no orbit2). To see more please do first pacman -Syu - should tell you more.
pacman -Syu tells me that I do have unresolved dependencies since my kernel is frozen until a certain bug is resolved:
warning: linux: ignoring package upgrade (3.2.14-1 => 3.3.2-1)
resolving dependencies...
warning: ignoring package linux-3.3.2-1
warning: cannot resolve "linux>=3.3", a dependency of "virtualbox-modules"
warning: ignoring package linux-3.3.2-1
warning: cannot resolve "linux>=3.3", a dependency of "virtualbox-modules"
But shouldn't yaourt handle this in the same way that pacman would?
My conclusion so far is that yaourt doesn't work with unresolved dependencies. So I will try another tool.