Pacman hook spam, how do you resolve it

Issues & Assistance
1

Hey there,
I really like the tools that garuda provides, but some of it is just annoying.
A little context: Today I discovered that the pacman syncing is not a default hook in pacman, and since I only had trouble with it in the past, I would like to disable it. Trying to find the hook responsible for that, I stumbled upon /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/ which seems to house all the pacman hooks. Among those are firefox, thunderbird, together with the foreign notifications hook. I don't really need the firefox hooks, so I tried to uninstall that, but it turns out, that the firefox hooks are owned by garuda-browser-settings. Trying to uninstall that I noticed that a lot of actually useful configuration packages of garuda depend on it. I then proceeded to try to uninstall the annoying foreign notifications hook, but the problem here was that the package actually was useful and contained important files.
Since there is no way to disable hooks through the pacman config, how can I remove that hook? It's really annoying and doesn't really serve a purpose.
What about the config packages? Why do they depend on other completely unrelated packages?
What hook is responsible for the sync hook? Where is it located and how can I remove it? This is one of the worst packages that I have encountered for how many problems it has created for me.
Thanks!

ystem:
  Kernel: 5.18.8-zen1-1-zen arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 12.1.0
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  Desktop: wayfire v: 0.8.0-b8211e3b info: waybar vt: 1 dm: greetd
    Distro: Garuda Linux base: Arch Linux
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: Gigabyte product: AX370-Gaming 3 v: N/A
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Gigabyte model: AX370-Gaming 3-CF v: x.x
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends v: F50a
    date: 11/27/2019
CPU:
  Info: model: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen+ gen: 2
    built: 2018-21 process: GF 12nm family: 0x17 (23) model-id: 8 stepping: 2
    microcode: 0x800820D
  Topology: cpus: 1x cores: 6 tpc: 2 threads: 12 smt: enabled cache:
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    L3: 16 MiB desc: 2x8 MiB
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    3: 4051 4: 3890 5: 4040 6: 4046 7: 4036 8: 4003 9: 4074 10: 3957 11: 4050
    12: 4025 bogomips: 86225
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  Vulnerabilities:
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  Type: l1tf status: Not affected
  Type: mds status: Not affected
  Type: meltdown status: Not affected
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  Type: spec_store_bypass
    mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl
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Audio:
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  Device-3: Logitech Webcam C270 type: USB driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo
  Device-4: C-Media USB Microphone type: USB
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Network:
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Sensors:
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Info:
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  used: 7.5 GiB (24.0%) Init: systemd v: 251 default: graphical
  tool: systemctl Compilers: gcc: 12.1.0 clang: 13.0.1 Packages: apt: 0
  pacman: 2020 lib: 497 flatpak: 0 Shell: Zsh v: 5.9 running-in: alacritty
  inxi: 3.3.19
Garuda (2.6.4-2):
  System install date:     2021-12-28
  Last full system update: 2022-07-03
  Is partially upgraded:   No
  Relevant software:       NetworkManager
  Windows dual boot:       No/Undetected
  Snapshots:               Snapper
  Failed units:
2

You know how hooks work, right? These only get triggered if the condition, in this case a particular package being installed or upgraded, is triggered. So it wouldn’t affect things if the particular package isn’t installed.
About the foreign notifications hook: we made the choice to include it.

Why do you want to remove the sync hook?

Care to name some of those problems? All I read so far are problems caused by not agreeing with particular choices we made when creating this package.

5 Likes
3

You know how hooks work, right?

Yeah I do, but most of them are literal bloat since I never use them. I use waterfox and not something else.

Why do you want to remove the sync hook?
Care to name some of those problems?

The problem that made me hate this so extremely hard is the fact that 9/10 pacman actions it just desides to sync forever. Just today this even ended up lagging my system out to hard that I had to reboot. It seems to have use 100% cpu.
I hope you understand me now. This has been my one and only most hated ever problem with Garuda.

4

You are literally talking about a few kb of files sitting around doing nothing.

This literally just writes buffered data to disk.

To solve all these issues you could write your own hook deleting all of these files. However, we are not responsible for eventual issues arising because of that.

3 Likes
5

This literally just writes buffered data to disk.

Why is this not in default pacman if this just runs sync?
While I do understand that a few kbs are not much, I am always trying to keep my system clean. Not only that, but some hooks are just straight up annoying, like the foreign package notification. I know that I am using the aur, and I have done that for quite a while, so why tell me that?

This still doesn’t explain, why the garuda-browser-settings package is required by the garuda-bash-settings and btrf related packages.

I do understand that this all sounds very toxic, but that’s not supposed to be the case. This is not a garuda-ranting-session. I would just like to address my issues with pacman.

6

Take a look at this file for a template for disabling specific pacman hooks: PKGBUILD · main · Garuda Linux / Packages / Stable PKGBUILDs / garuda-reduce-verbosity · GitLab
Basically, you just need to create those links to /dev/null with the same name as the hook you want to disable but in the /etc/ directory instead of /usr/lib. You don't need to do this in a package.

Just be aware that you are entering uncharted territory and that any future support requests MUST include that you did this in the support request.

5 Likes
7

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