Pacman sucks ass and this is a hill I will die on. Sure, it's fast, but there's such a thing as too fast. Like when I was updating the system once and it decided to delete bash to replace it, but it couldn't replace it because bash was gone already and my shell died since that's what I was logging in with. Oops! System is completely unusable now, got to reinstall arch again, because pacman pulls stunts like this.

[–] sodium_nitride@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There's no way that's true, right? Surely, the program would be smarter?

[–] Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago

You would think that, but it happened to me several times over the course of about five years, with different parts of the core of the os. Granted, this was back when arch was in its infancy, before systemd was even a thing, so pacman may be smarter now. But I've completely written it off since it happened so many times. And reinstalling arch back them took the better part of a weekend, so it's not like it was an easy fix.

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 2 points 2 weeks ago

This type of shit happens if you intentionally mess up your own system (or use Manjaro). pacman requires extra confirmation (instructions only found in its man page) before even allowing you to delete bash (base requires it). bash has also never been replaced, and even if you deleted it, it would still be loaded in RAM. Even still, if you deleted it and immediately rebooted, it would be a quick fix for anyone familiar with the distribution they're using, and would not require reinstalling the whole thing.