[SOLVED] Packaging bug affects pacman update

[mcloaked]

Running pacman earlier (on a rock64) today I get:

resolving dependencies...
warning: ignoring package libxml2-2.14.2-2
warning: cannot resolve "libxml2.so=16-64", a dependency of "libarchive"
:: The following package cannot be upgraded due to unresolvable dependencies:
libarchive

Also if updating everything else but ignoring libxml2 I then get:

pacman -Syu --ignore libxml2
:: Synchronising package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
alarm is up to date
aur is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
warning: libxml2: ignoring package upgrade (2.13.8-1 => 2.14.2-2)
resolving dependencies...
warning: ignoring package libxml2-2.14.2-2
warning: cannot resolve "libxml2.so=16-64", a dependency of "libarchive"
:: The following package cannot be upgraded due to unresolvable dependencies:
libarchive

:: Do you want to skip the above package for this upgrade? [y/N]

libarchive is required by mkinitcpio and pacman so are very important.

Hopefully this dependency will be resolved before long.

[mcloaked]

I came across this arch linux forum post:

bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=305276

so, discovering that my system did indeed have a package called 'rest' installed, and then doing:
pacman -R rest
checking dependencies...

Packages (1) rest-0.8.1+r4+ge5ee6ef-1

Total Removed Size: 0.82 MiB

:: Do you want to remove these package

which removed the package 'rest' without issue, then updating with pacman -Syu succeeded just fine with the libxml2 package version 2.14.2-2 and rebooted to the newly updated kernel without any problem. So libxml didn't need rebuilding, but removing the package called 'rest' that I thought was not needed, was the solution for me - presumably that package was part of the original install.