Arch Linux User Repository

If you had informant installed prior to the Python 3.10 update, the installed package is built on Python 3.9 and will not work once pacman removes Python 3.9.

To fix this you just need to rebuild informant.

Informant seems to be broken with the installation of Python 3.10.

core/python 3.10.1-1 (11.3 MiB 53.6 MiB) (Installed)

➜ informant
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/informant", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('informant==0.4.5', 'console_scripts', 'informant')())
  File "/usr/bin/informant", line 22, in importlib_load_entry_point
    for entry_point in distribution(dist_name).entry_points
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 919, in distribution
    return Distribution.from_name(distribution_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 518, in from_name
    raise PackageNotFoundError(name)
importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError: No package metadata was found for informant

I was able to resolve the issue via this process:

yay -R informant
python -m pip install $(pip list --path ~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages | cut -d " " -f1 | egrep -v 'Package|---')
yay -S $(pacman -Qmq $(pacman -Qqo /usr/lib/python3.9)) --answerclean All
yay -S informant

If you haven't run a system update in the last few days the sgmllib issue should be all worked out by now (it was on the mirrors closest to me).

If you used the method posted by @m8D2 I would recommend that you run sudo pacman -D --asdeps python-sgmllib3k to have pacman properly track it as a dependency rather than explicitly installed (unless you want it explicitly installed).

See also: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Installation_reason

The sgmllib errors are caused by an update to the python-feedparser package dropping python-sgmllib as a dependency in python-feedparser 6.0.1-1 this is recently fixed in python-feedparser 6.0.1-2. A system update should fix this issue once the latest version of the feedparser package hits your mirror.

The solution posted by @m8D2 is correct if you need it before the feedparser update.

@waitnsea, i solved this by uninstalling informant and python-sgmlib, system update and installing python-sgmlib3k and re-installing informant:

yay -R informant python-sgmlib
sudo pacman -Syu python-sgmllib3k
yay -S informant

When I use:

informant

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'sgmllib'

I had a similar issue than @Aphosis.

However, installing with miniconda auto-activation set to false and without any virtual environment also made the trick.

Thank you for your work

@Aphosis no problem, thanks for posting the solution. The PKGBUILD uses python to build and install, I should probably make that directly reference the system python in order to avoid virtualenv issues like you had.

@bradford-smith94 Thanks for the quick answer.

Found something odd when listing the files as you suggested: don't know how I managed to do that but the package was built using an old virtualenv of mine.

Had to delete it, remove the cache and reinstall, and now all works fine.

Thanks for the help !

@Aphosis it should be in /usr/bin/informant, you can use pacman -Ql informant to show what files have been installed by the package. Did you get any error while installing it?

Hi,

First of all thanks for the awesome package.

It looks like informant broke for me a few updates ago, presumably since 0.4 or 0.4.1.

I didn't manage to make it work since then, it blocks pacman updates with a call to execv failed (No such file or directory).

What's weird is that the informant command itself is not available anymore. The current user is in the informant group.

Where should I look for the executable (or Python script) ?

Thanks again.

@dslink can you provide an example of what you are trying to do and what error message you are seeing?

the read command is making everything fail even just with pacman no aur helpers

Oh okay, thanks for the explanation @bradford-smith94. I already have an alias+script in bashrc to update all system+AUR packages and clean orphaned ones etc, so I just add read and check to that before the update/upgrade commands so that it'll always succeed once pacman starts going over the hooks. And in case of install I can set up another alias, I think.

@kortewegdevries I tried to make the hook interactive, it was my original idea and intention for the user to be able to read all unread news items and then choose to either continue or stop the transaction, but the pacman source code does not make that possible. When pacman executes a hook it closes stdin, so there is no way to get any input from the user. So doing check and read in the hook is not possible to do in a way that makes sure the user has time to actually read the news.

Since an interactive hook wasn't possible I chose to just have the hook stop updates so that you can have time to read the news before the transaction completes, especially since sometimes the news alerts you to manual intervention needed before/during the update.

In the case that there are more than 1 unread news items, you should use informant read before running an install/update. If you forget, that's fine informant will stop your update with a message like the screenshot you first posted. You can then use informant read and then re-run your update.

In the case that there is exactly 1 unread news item, the hook (check command) will print it and still fail (so you have time to read the news). This way running informant read as a second step is not required, you can just re-run your update.

Thanks @bradford-smith94. Do you mean I should do informant read on another terminal before running an install/update? Because currently the informant hook prevents pacman from completing if items are not read. And it just checks for new items, doesn't give me an option to read them in middle of a pacman transaction. To avoid this should the hook exec be check and read both?

Thanks @bradford-smith94. Do you mean I should do informant read on another terminal before running an install/update? Because currently the informant hook prevents pacman from completing if items are not read. And it just checks for new items, doesn't give me an option to read them in middle of a pacman transaction. To avoid this should the hook exec be check and read both.

@kortewegdevries That is the intended behavior. informant will stop your pacman transaction to give you time to/force you to read the news items that you may have missed. You can use informant read to read through the news items and then running your pacman command again should be successful.

Hi, is this warning supposed to be? I'm in the informant group and packages install just fine but the hook seems to report false...https://imgur.com/wG30EPZ Thanks.