This is sorta more of a feedback than an actual issue, because I've seen someone else complaining about it already but I can't remember where.
Sometimes, when I'm starting the system, I get a message at plymouth that says something about pacman files couldn't be loaded or something alike (i don't really remember the words and they go so fast at plymouth). It happened like 3 times, only since last week or so.
Generally, when it happens, I can't get past my login screen and have to reboot, but seems today, the 3rd time I noticed it, I could get to login and use the system and even do an update? I only noticed it when I rebooted the system and saw the message there, so...
I have absolutely no idea what's happening here, all I know is, it happens rarely and a reboot takes care of it, which is weird, and which is why I'm making this messy post. Thanks for reading.
I do also see this error occurring randomly in my system.
Checking in the journal, I see it happens when unit=pacman-files fails.
This is the Unit/Service
I guess this might be due to the service trying to start when network-online.target is not really finished (network is not online). In-fact, when it fails there are many error: failed retrieving file in the journal due to this pacman -Fy (synchronizing databases?).
I don't think this is anything really important, and, at least in my case, it is not so frequent and I have no login problem whatsoever when it occurs.
In my opinion, if you follow the good practice to always update the system before installing new packages, this is no problem at all.
Sorry, I had to leave for now, I'll check later.
What I remember is that pacman-files.service is triggered daily by pacman-files.timer.
I also searched in the arch and aur but with no luck.
This evening I'll check with pacman -Qo.
So the next question is whether this affects the boot process, or is it just an adjacent issue?
@AoriOjin If you disable the service and monitor the boot process for a while (e.g. a couple of days) it might narrow down whether this has any effect.
Alright so what I could grasp: it's an issue regarding just the iniciation because of network signal and besides that, it should have no effects on boot or usability whatsoever.
So the solution is just to ignore it and let the devs think about what they will or won't do about it?
Also, @jonathon I could disable the stuff and monitor the boot, but that would be more work for you people because Idk that much about how to disable anything. And as I have no idea about what 99% of the logs means, I'm sorry to say that's the only message I saw as an error there, specifically because I was looking for it :V
I'll disable it this evening, just to see if everything will be fine, especially tomorrow (I seem to recall that pacman-files.service is triggered by pacman-files.timer (I'll recheck that as well), which runs daily, and this would explain why the error seemed random to me).
Anyway, as I see it only runs pacman -Fy to synchronize the database, I really think there will be no problems at all disabling it.