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 Please do not flag the package out of date.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.

Instead of manually managing the informant group and /var/cache/informant in post_install() you could use sysusers.d and tmpfiles.d.

Check out plex-media-server for an AUR package that does this.

Installation is tripping over 00-informant.hook. I suspected that options=(zipman) might be the cause of these errors but removing it from PKGBUILD had no effect.

warning: could not get file information for usr/share/licenses/informant/LICENSE
warning: could not get file information for usr/share/man/man1/informant.1.gz
:: Running pre-transaction hooks...
(1/1) Performing snapper pre snapshots for the following configurations...
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) reinstalling informant  [---] 100%
error: could not extract /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/00-informant.hook (Zstd decompression failed: Unknown frame descriptor)
error: problem occurred while upgrading informant
NOTE: Add yourself to group "informant" to avoid the need for sudo
error: could not commit transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

As a workaround, I just manually run the install lines in package().

If you had informant installed prior to the Python 3.10 update, the installed package is built on Python 3.9 and will not work once pacman removes Python 3.9.

To fix this you just need to rebuild informant.

Informant seems to be broken with the installation of Python 3.10.

core/python 3.10.1-1 (11.3 MiB 53.6 MiB) (Installed)

➜ informant
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/informant", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('informant==0.4.5', 'console_scripts', 'informant')())
  File "/usr/bin/informant", line 22, in importlib_load_entry_point
    for entry_point in distribution(dist_name).entry_points
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 919, in distribution
    return Distribution.from_name(distribution_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 518, in from_name
    raise PackageNotFoundError(name)
importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError: No package metadata was found for informant

I was able to resolve the issue via this process:

yay -R informant
python -m pip install $(pip list --path ~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages | cut -d " " -f1 | egrep -v 'Package|---')
yay -S $(pacman -Qmq $(pacman -Qqo /usr/lib/python3.9)) --answerclean All
yay -S informant

If you haven't run a system update in the last few days the sgmllib issue should be all worked out by now (it was on the mirrors closest to me).

If you used the method posted by @m8D2 I would recommend that you run sudo pacman -D --asdeps python-sgmllib3k to have pacman properly track it as a dependency rather than explicitly installed (unless you want it explicitly installed).

See also: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Installation_reason

The sgmllib errors are caused by an update to the python-feedparser package dropping python-sgmllib as a dependency in python-feedparser 6.0.1-1 this is recently fixed in python-feedparser 6.0.1-2. A system update should fix this issue once the latest version of the feedparser package hits your mirror.

The solution posted by @m8D2 is correct if you need it before the feedparser update.

@waitnsea, i solved this by uninstalling informant and python-sgmlib, system update and installing python-sgmlib3k and re-installing informant:

yay -R informant python-sgmlib
sudo pacman -Syu python-sgmllib3k
yay -S informant

When I use:

informant

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'sgmllib'