Failed retrieving 'core.db' Pacman

[pepedog]

Mikeclark, what image are you using (date)?
This one?
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/archlinuxarm/archlinux-hf-2013-06-15/

[Mikeclark]

Pepedog:
No, it's the hf-2013-05-14 version.

[sdjf]

MikeClark: what shows up if you run the following

ls -l /var/lib/pacman/sync/

Running pacman as on offline utility is more work than using the Pi's internet connection, but might be another way to go. Have you thought of just wgetting the files (either with your Pi or another machine) and putting the current ones in the above directory? I have instructions on following page about running pacman without internet:

http://sdjf.esmartdesign.com/raspberrypi/pacman.html

wget will keep trying one mirror db file that you give it the url of until it succeeds, unless your network connection is not good or your limit on number of tries is too small. I run a script on my pi or another box to automate downloading the db files.

I have not yet had a chance to try just getting the db files with pacman on my May image online, will still try when I can.

[Mikeclark]

sdjf:
ls -l /var/lib/pacman/sync/ gets me five small files, alarm.db, aur.db, community.db, core.db and extra.db, all less than 1Kib in size. What is that telling me?
I can wget files by several routes, but manual extraction of that kind does not tell me what dependencies are involved; that's what pacman is for, isn't it?

[sdjf]

Posting the exact output from ls -l there would tell us what the date was on those files, for one thing.

But there is something seriously wrong there if all 5 files are less than 1k. Some db files are like 500kb or so.

There is no extraction to be done, putting the full db files into that directory would enable Pacman to proceed to tell you what packages needed updating. Not the gz versions, but the db files from the repository. I have done that, I know it works.

It still does not tell us why you cannot just retrieve the files, are you absolutely positive that your rootfs does not have any errors in it?

I don't recall, can your Pi ping sites on the internet successfully?

EDIT: Using the may image, which was fully updated only once, on May 25, I was just able to issue pacman -Sy and succeeded in retrieving 4 of the 5 db files. Pacman gave up trying to download community as the download was too slow, but if I try later, should be able to do it.

Have you been able to do any updating at all with this image, or is it totally vanilla?

[Mikeclark]

sdjf: the five files are all dated 9th July, which was the last time I tried to run pacman; I can ping the Universe, including the four mirror sites nearest me; I have just run e2fsck on the root partition again, and it claims the partition is clean; the only additions I have been able to install on the raw system have been the gcc set; and I have no Internet download problems - my average download speed is 32Mbps.
I am reluctant to download and install the latest version of Arch, because the version I'm using was a pig to set up, and I'm close to giving up on Archie altogether.
And, for reasons I won't go into, I can't post my system output per se.

[pepedog]

Do you have pacnew versions of /etc/pacman.conf and/or /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist ?
rename the pacnew files so they get used.
If no pacnew lets see the contents of those files

[Mikeclark]

pepedog:

There was a /pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew; I renamed that, and ran pacman -Syu. All went well, until:

checking for file conflicts
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
filesystem: /bin exists in filesystem (likewise /sbin and /usr/sbin)*

*my comments in brackets.

However, pacman -S lxde and pacman -S gcc went without a hitch. So, has the problem been solved, or not?

[pepedog]

core.db problem solved.
Now you face https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring-update-intervention/

[Mikeclark]

We-e-ell...... pacman -Syu ran smoothly, apart from three warnings - creation of pacnew files for:

/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/00-dns.sh
/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/00-dns.sh and
/etc/sysctl.conf

Is that a good update, or not? The system now seems to install new packages smoothly, but subsequent attempts to launch some of them have not been too successful. For example, the midori browser just blows up, and the evolution mail system gives me a load of invective before (eventually) loading!