All Articles

Remove Transitional Packages in Archlinux

Arch User Repository (AUR) is one of the key features to Archlinux. If you installed many packages by AUR, you might see the warning of Missing AUR Packages which means those packages have been removed from AUR. In this case, it is recommended to uninstall them and install alternatives. However, sometimes you cannot uninstall them due to the dependencies.

For example, the package xorg-font-utils was dropped. When I attempt to remove the package, it is imformed that the package xorg-font-utils is needed as dependencies to other packages.

In order to find out its dependencies relationship, I use the command pactree -r xorg-font-utils.

pactree for xorg-font-utils

Well, we can see the dependencies relationship of xorg-font-utilspowerline-fonts-gitplasma-integration. From the name of package, we can easily get that plasma-integration is a package from archlinux official repositories (Extra) and powerline-fonts-git is an AUR one. So I hypothesize that the dependency between these two package is optional which means we can find a alternative package.

The package information of plasma-integration shows that the font package ttf-hack is one of dependencies. If I attempt to install the package ttf-hack, the message of conflicting with powerline-fonts-git is shown that means my hypothesis is proved.

So after replacing the package powerline-fonts-git by ttf-hack, there is no longer a dependency problem to xorg-font-utils and it is possible to remove this package.

Here are my tips for checking package dependencies when removing transitional packages in Archlinux.