Arch Linux User Repository

Hi! Today I noticed that Informant shows me an extra error message "Max retries exceeded with url" starting with "ERROR:" in uppercase red colored letters, just before it came up with the intended actual news interruption.

See below for the fragment of terminal output which makes it clear.

How do I need to interpret this? Is this a tiny issue in Informant or is it really just some weird short during internet connection issue that I was experiencing?

(...)
(1/4) Checking Arch News with Informant ...
ERROR: Unable to read cache information: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='archlinux.org', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /feeds/news/ (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x7ff5d6c5e950>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno -2] Name or service not known'))
:: informant: Stopping upgrade to print news
Git migration announcement
Mon, 15 May 2023 19:50:21 +0000

This Friday morning (2023-05-19) the Git packaging migration will start until Sunday
(...)

Do I understand it correctly that this (broken hook) applies to any AUR package that adds pacman hooks, not only informant?

(To be more precise, it would only happen to locally-built packages, be it AUR or not.)

@tocic

Thanks! I was having this Python error, followed by an exception trace with details.

In my case simply uninstalling was enough to see no error anymore. Turns out that it happened on package installation, not the actual build. However, just to be sure I decided to do one more time and also rebuild the thing.

@tocic Thanks for the "!informant" idea, I don't know why I hadn't thought of that yet. Hopefully that will make handling Python updates easier.

@kullfar I agree that it's always worth to increment pkgrel to take the burden off the user, but note that in this case it'll still produce the error because you can't upgrade any package with the old hook, even informant itself :). Maybe the upstream can circumvent that with the !informant string in the Target field.

It's better to increment pkgrel, otherwise 50% of users will spend their time discovering what had happened until they realized that they need to uninstall/instal the package (as I did).

@tocic thank you! that worked

Thanks @zagg, added as a makedepends. I didn't increment pkgrel so as not to trigger updates for anyone who already has it installed.

I feel this would have actually been helpful to do. Things like aurtools don't notice the new PKBUILD at the moment.

If you have the following error

  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 565, in from_name
    raise PackageNotFoundError(name)
importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError: No package metadata was found for informant

, you need to uninstall informant (or manually disable the pacman hook), rebuild it against python3.11, and install again.

This PKGBUILD should not be flagged out of date. 0.4.5 is the latest version of informant according to the upstream URL. The out-of-date report indicates a build failure but the package builds just fine on my system.