Arch Linux User Repository

After a major Python upgrade informant will break with an error likely including something like:

importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError: No package metadata was found for informant

This is inconvenient and not ideal, as it will cause all following pacman commands to fail. But since the version of Python that informant was built against is no longer there, this is the way it will be.

In this case, informant simply needs to be rebuilt against the newest Python version. Please do not flag the package out of date. Since v0.4.6 and upgrade/install (rebuild) of just informant itself should not trigger the hook, so you may be able to just force a rebuild of informant. However, this will still fail if rebuilding informant requires pacman to install makedepends. In that case: informant does not block removes, so first run sudo pacman -R informant and then reinstall informant (make sure it forces a rebuilt and doesn't reinstall a cached version).

Further discussion of the Python major version update causing errors can be found at the Github issue: https://github.com/bradford-smith94/informant/issues/40.

@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.

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

Don't you think it might be good to add python-setuptools as a deps.

==> Starting build()...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/tmp/pkg/src/informant-0.4.5/setup.py", line 2, in <module>
    from setuptools import setup
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'setuptools'
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...