Partial upgrades are unsupported

Let that be a lesson :bojack horseman S03E06:

I use a Arch Linux OS system as my daily desktop enviroment since May 2017. It cost me quite some time to install Arch Linux duo system alongside with a MacOS inside a 2015 MBP with rEFInd boot manager and a customed linux kernel for macbook and all other stuff for like fan control, keyboard mapping, backlight, HiDPI, etc...

I didn't really know pacman(the arch package manager) throughly at all in the beginning, and shortly after the installation when I want to install some new package, pacman gave me a 404 error.

I thought "Should be fine, I didn't do anything wrong, let me just find and paste some command from stack overflow and everything should be fine."

Then I typed(from pacman.log):

[2017-07-07 18:26] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syy mitmproxy'

Yes, it works. Everything is fine afterwards, And this becomes the only solution when I can't install/upgrade something thereafter, it works quite well dispite some minor conflicts where I just need to find a similar replacement in quite a long time.

But it didn't play well all along.

Finally, in the end of 2018 I noticed that vlc is not working along with all other video player and it seems that I'm getting too much error installing any package.

This is wierd, what could possibly be wrong after such a long time?

It turns out that everything was wrong from the very beginning, because arch linux is a rolling release system and Partial upgrade are unsupported. Which means that once partial upgrade is done, sooner or later some package confliction will appear and it's only gonna get worse with time gone by.

Which is just the situation I'm currenly at. I can not install any cool package any more and old packages are broken as is. Moreover since this is the only working pc I have, Nothing risky can be made for it.

I already experienced the exact problem when I upgrade some package I don't know one late midnight which totally broke my system and toke me another 2 hours to fix it from 2AM to 4AM and exhaust me entirely.

Gladly I've got another thinkpad t420 that I used for almost 8 years old enought that the motherboard battery drained. I've reinstalled it and is working like supposed to be(hope so), now I would(maybe, maybe not) re-install my macbook someday.

I don't know it still, it's not like I can know things throughly from the beginning how ever one try. I'm kind of scared more, but I'll try to be more careful nexttime.