Pacman (Linux) Update Issue

I run Linux on all of my computers. Since the summer of 2022, I have run EndeavourOS on my main desktop workstation. EndeavourOS is based on Arch Linux and primarily differs in that it comes with an easy-to-use installer and configuration out of the box (it does not however come with a graphical package manager). EndeavourOS, like upstream Arch, comes with the Pacman package manager for installing packages from the Arch Linux repositories.

In order to update package repositories and update my installed packages, I run the following command in a console:

sudo pacman -Syu

This command “synchronizes the [package] repository databases and updates the system’s packages.” (See Pacman documentation.)

This usually works without any problems. However, I ran into a blocker on the afternoon of March 4, 2025:

My first thought was to update my mirror lists, which are sources for downloading packages. However, this did not cure the error. I also tried the command for removing a lock on the packages database, but that also did not resolve the error. My next thought was to turn to the website for upstream Arch Linux. Perhaps there was a news update explaining the error. Sure enough, I found my answer in a news post titled Cleaning up old repositories from February 17, 2025 (see archived).

The update begins as follows:

Around two years ago, we’ve merged the [community] repository into [extra] as part of the git migration. In order to not break user setups, we kept these repositories around in an unused and empty state. We’re going to clean up these old repositories on 2025-03-01.

I was blissfully unaware of this migration, although I had noticed for some time that when I ran the command to refresh my package repositories, community was not upgrading (core, extra, and multilib had no issue). But I had no problems so I never thought too deeply about it. Of course, this news update explains why no problems suddenly changed: Community went from existing but being empty to being removed entirely. Why did that stop the command from working?

On systems where /etc/pacman.conf still references the old [community] repository, pacman -Sy will return an error on trying to sync repository metadata.

Indeed. Now how do I fix the problem?

Please make sure to remove all use of the aforementioned repositories from your /etc/pacman.conf (for which a .pacnew was shipped with pacman>=6.0.2-7)!

pacman.conf is a text file which lists the repositories that Pacman is supposed to check and use. I decided to edit it from the console by running the following command:

sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf

Nano is a text editor and this command opened the pacman.conf file in my terminal. I scrolled down in the file until I found the following lines:

[community]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

To test, I commented these lines out.

#[community]
#Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

With this, Pacman should no longer include the non-existent community repository. I saved pacman.conf and then ran the command to refresh my package repositories and update my installed packages. The command worked exactly as expected with community removed. Having confirmed that everything worked, I re-opened the pacman.conf file and removed community, community-testing (note: community-testing had been commented out by default) and testing (this is also no longer extant, but it was commented out on my system).

Having just written an article about the importance of reading the docs when learning something new, I suppose this article highlights the importance of staying up-to-date with updates about updating. I was almost two years late in learning about the discontinuation of the Arch Linux community repository thanks in no small part to my not asking questions about my pacman console output. My tardiness led me into an error, but doing what I should have done in the first place led me out of error.