Hello. Please critique how I’m updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I’m doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I’m doing - but as I’ve often learned, it’s easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.

Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I’ve chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:

sudo rsync -aAXHv --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /media/linuxhdd/archrsyncbackup

I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I’m not using the -S option because I don’t think I’ll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)

Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps

Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector

sudo reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This should sort the fastest 25 mirrors into mirrorlist. Remember to use the -Syyu option in step 6 if this step was done

Step 4: Clean the journal

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=4weeks

This should keep 4 weeks of files.

Step 5: Clean the cache

sudo paccache -r

This should keep no more than 3 versions laying around. Once and a while, I can clean out all uninstalled packages with -ruk0 options instead.

Step 6: Upgrade Arch packages with pacman

sudo pacman -Syu

I need to watch for pacnew and pacsave files and deal with them (although I haven’t seen any yet)

Step 7: Review the pacman log

nano /var/log/pacman.log

This should tell me about any warnings, errors, instructions, or other things I need to deal with.

Step 8: Remove Orphans

pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns -

This could be recursive and needs to be run more than once. Instead, I’ll just run it once every time I update. This should keep things cleaned out.

Step 9: Update AUR packages

Check the build scripts to make sure the package hasn’t been taken over and that it won’t run anything funny.

yay -Sua

This should update just the AUR packages

Step 10: Remove AUR orphans

yay -Yc

The wiki says this “removes unnecessary dependencies” which I believe means AUR-only orphan packages.

Step 11: Reboot

reboot

Step 12: Update flatpaks from the GUI (Gnome–>Software–>Updates)

Any mistakes? Suggestions?

Thanks!

  • mbw@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    Just so that you have an additional data point, here’s how I do it.

    I run a backup first, using borg-backup. I used rsync in the past, then rsnapshot and now borg since it allows for compressed incremental backups, diffing on the “chunk” level, meaning I won’t backup the entirety of a modified file again and safe a lot of space.

    I used yay before, but like you I didn’t want to go into it blindly and do some modicum of sanity-checking the PKGBUILD for changes beforehand. Since it wasn’t obvious on what would be the best way of using yay for doing this, I asked around on the ArchLinux Forum, and ultimately decided to try one of the simpler tools suggested in the Arch Wiki, aurutils.

    After setting it up (the author helped me migrate), I now use it as follows:

    • aur repo --upgrades: Searches for new versions of aur packages and displays them
    • aur sync --upgrades --no-build: Performs a git-pull under ~/.cache/aurutils/sync and opens vifm so that I can look at a diff of the PKGBUILD and all the other changes in the affected directory.
    • aur sync --upgrades --no-view: Builds the package. It is now available as part of the custom (local) repository used only for aur packages, but hasn’t been upgraded yet. That is, a package.tar.gz or whatever has been created and put into ~/.cache/aurutils/sync/, where the PKGBUILD resides as well
    • sudo pacman -Syu: Upgrades all packages from all repositories, including the ones from the custom repository

    I won’t argue pro or against one aur helper or the other, but I feel like I have a little more insight about what happens under the hood since I made the switch. That being said, in the very beginning, I managed aur packages manually. This works also, but at some point became too tedious for my taste. I am happy with the semi-automatic approach I am using now.