Apologies for any typos. I’m on my phone. (Let’s not talk about why, it’s embarrassing.)
The Arch Linux qubes-vm-dependencies is breaking updates because it pins a pulseaudio version which has long since been discarded (17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e, vs. the current version 17.0+r88+geee0e8f22-1). The qubes-vm-dependencies package needs to be updated for the new pulseaudio or pulseaudio (via qubes-vm-pulseaudio) needs to be made an optional dependency. Otherwise it’s impossible to update Arch Linux templates without pinning the entire transitive dependency tree, which is already strongly recommended against by Arch.
I’d also like to note, in case whoever actually maintains the Arch template is reading: Arch extremely dislikes specifying package dependency versions, because of exactly this issue. The dependency should be specified as just pulseaudio. If it can’t be, then you need to start hosting a qubes-pulseaudio that meets your needs, and maybe mark it incompatible with the normal one. Arch-hosted packages are going to roll and old versions will cease being normally installable very quickly.
For users, there are two workarounds:
- Install the right version of pulseaudio from the Arch Archive, then prevent updates to it via the Pacman config
- Trim
qubes-vm-pulseaudioout from the dependency tree and cajole everything around it into updating anyway, and brace for further (manual) updates in the future
I will not be providing detailed steps because again, this is extremely discouraged. If you need your system to work, you can look through the extensive wiki and read all the attendant warnings yourself. Also I’m still on my phone and my hands are already cramping.
