This error message is not understandable nor actionable
Pamac --version
Pamac 11.7.0-1 - libpamac I have no idea, About doesn't say
Variant in use
GUI
Distribution
Manjaro
Desktop environment
KDE
What's not working
I opened Pamac (GUI), I selected all available updates, and I clicked "Apply".
I got this error:
This is completely nonsensical, at least as far as the user can tell.
It says "Failed to prepare transaction", but then there is an "Apply" button, which obviously I'm scared to even touch.
What am I going to apply, if the transaction has failed to be prepared???
What does "failed to prepare transaction" even mean? You have to understand that is not clear to a user unless they have a very deep technical understanding of how the process of installing updates work in detail.
When an error occurs when installing updates (which, regrettably, happens pretty often), there are two crucial pieces of information that I expect from the error message:
- what I can do about it (and if the answer is nothing, tell me that very explicitly)
- what the source of the error is, and by source I mean the project to which I need to report the bug.
Because when some update fails to install, there's a bug somewhere (unless it's something like a network error downloading a file or something of that kind, in which case there should be a "retry" button for me to press). It cannot be something I did wrong, because I delegate all the work of installing and updating software to a package manager, and I never tinker with it, so if something fails to install properly, it's because either the package manager doesn't work properly (but that's very rare) or because some of the packages has a bug (whether that's in the form of a dependency not specified correctly or something else). So when I encounter such an error I want to report it immediately to whoever is maintaining that package.
In this case with such an error, I have no clue of either of these two things.
The "Edit build files" button, I have no idea if that offers a solution to someone with deep knowledge of the stuff being installed and how the install process works, but that's not me anyway.
I hit Esc (which I guess was the same as clicking Cancel) and I got this:
Assuming this is related to the first error (which seems a pretty reasonable assumption), this at least tells me that there's something wrong about the "gitahead" package (kind of answering question 2 above), but what sense does it make to have this as a second popup after Cancel-ing the first, nonsensical one??
This sequence doesn't make sense: i) the first error, saying that some transaction has failed to be prepared, with no explanation of what the issue is, an "Apply" button that would apply who-knows what, and an option to cancel ii) when I cancel, another error saying basically the same thing (failed to prepare transaction) but with a little bit more context. Was this a second error that occurred after cancelling the failed transaction? Doesn't seem likely. So why wasn't everything in a single popup?
I'm not sure whether the second popup was displayed after exiting the first popup, or if it was fired immediately before and was hidden behind it and became visible when I closed the other one.
How to reproduce?
I don't know. What I did was:
- I selected all available updates
- clicked Apply