[arch-general] Are base packages assumed?

[Marco]

Hi Allan,

> Are you sure it was a "-Syu" and not an "-Sy" followed by installing
> something (which many people now have discovered is bad...).  The readline
> and bash packages were one after the other so readline was in the [core]
> repo without base for about one second.  It is unlikely any mirror did a
> sync of the repo db in that time.

Ok, I admit it was something like that ;)

 It was my older laptop, I have / mounted on a 4 G partition, and I
had 1.3 G free. I upgraded after a couple of months, so I had to
download 700 M of packages with ~2 G installed dimension. So I decided
to do it piecewise, starting with the kernel and other big pkgs
(texlive, openjdk...). Pacman downloaded and installed kernel and
dependencies, with readline 6, not touching bash 3. Then -Scc, and I
went on with another group of packages. After I while I got an error
message (something like readline.so.5 not found on filesystem) and I
was not able anymore to login as root, nor to halt or reboot. Then I
looked in the bbs and found that the problem was that I did'n install
bash4. Booted from a live cd and fixed it.
Still, pacman let me install readline 6 without upgrading to bash 4. I
consider it a bug (even if the policy and common sense say that you
should upgrade with -Syu).

Cheers,
Marco