[Mipsel] Installation problems, updated base tarball needed?

[malstrond at gmail.com]

Hi,

I'm trying to install the mipsel port on my Yeeloong, but the most
recent the base tarball (parabola-mips64el-20120912.tar.bz2 at the
time of writing) is more than a year old and seems to be very
outdated.

This caused a circular dependency issue:
The filesystem update that moved the binaries to /usr/bin [1] requires
you to update all packages while ignoring filesystem and bash, so the
remaining binaries get moved out of /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin.
But one of those packages is glibc-2.18-5, which requires
filesystem>=2013.01. Pacman does not handle this gracefully, gets
thrown into a loop and it prints the following messages several dozen
times:
-'warning: cannot resolve filesystem>=2013.01, a dependency of "glibc"'
-'warning: ignoring package filesystem-2013.05-2'.
The new pacman-4.1.2-1 also requires bash>=4.2.042-2 (which you are
supposed to ignore), and that causes another error:
-'warning: cannot resolve bash>=2013.01', a dependency of "pacman"'

I used brain0's suggestion [2] to fix it and it worked, but that
solutions means you have to deliberately put your system into a broken
state. What I did was:
    pacman -Su -d --ignore filesystem
    /usr/lib/ld-2.18.so /usr/bin/rm -r /sbin /usr/sbin
    /usr/lib/ld-2.18.so /usr/bin/pacman -Su
Afterwards you should reinstall all packages that were upgraded during
this process, because all post_install scripts will have failed, for
example generating the initial ramdisk.

Besides that, it still uses initscripts instead of systemd and the
included keyring isn't working, you can't even run 'pacman -S
parabola-keyring' without setting SigLevel = Never for all repos.

Greetings,
Malstrond


1: https://parabolagnulinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring-update-intervention
2: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1282528#p1282528