I’m one of those Arch users who apparently doesn’t use arch properly: I install updates daily, including packages from the AUR. This has the great benefit of giving me the most up-to-date packages available from upstream. However, the downside of meaning I have the latest packages from upstream, meaning if something breaks, even temporarily, it breaks for me.
I’m also one of those crazy people who uses arch on my work machine. Craziness aside, it’s never caused me an issue, until today.
After running updates this morning, as I normally would, I went to start the project I was working on today locally, and was met with this wonderful message:
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Error loading psycopg2 module: /home/jake/Projects/******/env/lib/python3.5/site-packages/psycopg2/.libs/libresolv-2-c4c53def.5.so: symbol __res_maybe_init, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference
As this was a work machine, I didn’t have the time to research into the correct solution. I knew this was something to do with updates, because that’s all that had changed between the last time it worked and now. But I had a feeling rolling back updates to a given date, especially on arch, would be fairly painful. Much to my surprise, it was super simple!
After frantically googling, so my boss didn’t notice my downtime, I found this article, which solved my needs completely. A simple config edit, and one command, and I was back to working.
The way this solution works is by rather than using the current state of the package repos, we use an archive from a specific date.
Edit the mirrorlist to point to the archive at a specific date. Change the contents of /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist to:
Server=https://archive.archlinux.org/repos/2017/09/08/$repo/os/$arch
Remember to take a backup beforehand just in case! Here’s I’ve set the date to last Friday (8th September 2017), but just replace the date in the URL with the date you need (YYYY/MM/DD).
Force update package repos, and install packages. If there are newer packages installed than are available in the repos, they’ll be downgraded.
sudo pacman -Syyuu
Depending on what packages have been downgraded, you may have to reboot to apply these changes. For the change I needed, a reboot wasn’t needed. I just relaunched the terminal, and got on as normal.
To revert, just restore the backup of the pacman mirrorlist, and re-run the above pacman command.
Generally, having out of date packages on your system is a bad idea. Not only for security reasons, but stability and compatibility. The article goes through a couple more too.
A few days later, After tweeting this post, I had a discussion with @MortenLinderud about the issue, who pointed out that the library had already been fixed. So after updating psycopg2, my issue went away!
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