Dear pacman devs,

Recently I rendered my system unusable because of two things. i. the way
I run my upgrades and ii. the way pacman is handling error codes from
triggered build scripts; here dkms.

i.
I run updates like:

--- paste:
% pikaur --noconfirm -Suy && backup && reboot
--- eop


What happened in my case was, that the zfs-dkms build failed, but
pikaur/pacman returned SUCCESS, which then let backup and reboot run. I
see I should have checked the upgrade process, I know that.

Anyways initially, I opened an issue at pikaur [0], but it seems that
pacman underneath simply warns about failing dkms builds.

0: https://github.com/actionless/pikaur/issues/591

ii.
So now I am writing to you, and would like to ask for your opinion, if
this is supposed to behave like this or maybe this could be improved a
bit. I mean not to change defaults, but maybe to add an option/switch to
handle the dkms-build errors.

What do you think?

Here the snippet from a pure pacman run:
--- paste:
# pacman --color=never --sync --verbose --noconfirm zfs-dkms; echo $?
Root : /
Conf File : /etc/pacman.conf
DB Path : /var/lib/pacman/
Cache Dirs: /var/cache/pacman/pkg/
Hook Dirs : /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/ /etc/pacman.d/hooks/
Lock File : /var/lib/pacman/db.lck
Log File : /var/log/pacman.log
GPG Dir : /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/
Targets : zfs-dkms
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (2) zfs-utils-2.1.0-2 zfs-dkms-2.1.0-1

Total Download Size: 29.03 MiB
Total Installed Size: 103.98 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
:: Retrieving packages...
zfs-utils-2.1.0-2-x86_64 29.0 MiB 22.4 MiB/s 00:01 [###############################################] 100%
(2/2) checking keys in keyring [###############################################] 100%
(2/2) checking package integrity [###############################################] 100%
(2/2) loading package files [###############################################] 100%
(2/2) checking for file conflicts [###############################################] 100%
(2/2) checking available disk space [###############################################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/2) installing zfs-utils [###############################################] 100%
Optional dependencies for zfs-utils
python: pyzfs and extra utilities, [installed]
python-cffi: pyzfs [installed]
(2/2) installing zfs-dkms [###############################################] 100%
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/5) Reloading system manager configuration...
(2/5) Reloading device manager configuration...
(3/5) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(4/5) Install DKMS modules
==> dkms install --no-depmod -m zfs -v 2.1.0 -k 5.14.2-arch1-2
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 5.14.2-arch1-2 (x86_64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/zfs/2.1.0/build/make.log for more information.
==> Warning, `dkms install --no-depmod -m zfs -v 2.1.0 -k 5.14.2-arch1-2' returned 10
==> depmod 5.14.2-arch1-2
(5/5) Updating linux initcpios...
==> Building image from preset: /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset: 'default'
-> -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux.img
==> Starting build: 5.14.2-arch1-2
-> Running build hook: [base]
-> Running build hook: [udev]
-> Running build hook: [autodetect]
-> Running build hook: [modconf]
-> Running build hook: [block]
==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: xhci_pci
-> Running build hook: [filesystems]
-> Running build hook: [keyboard]
-> Running build hook: [fsck]
==> Generating module dependencies
==> Creating zstd-compressed initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
==> Image generation successful
==> Building image from preset: /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset: 'fallback'
-> -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img -S autodetect
==> Starting build: 5.14.2-arch1-2
-> Running build hook: [base]
-> Running build hook: [udev]
-> Running build hook: [modconf]
-> Running build hook: [block]
==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: wd719x
==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: aic94xx
==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: xhci_pci
-> Running build hook: [filesystems]
-> Running build hook: [keyboard]
-> Running build hook: [fsck]
==> Generating module dependencies
==> Creating zstd-compressed initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
==> Image generation successful
pacman --color=never --sync --verbose --noconfirm zfs-dkms 732.76s user 81.43s system 306% cpu 4:25.30 total
0

--- eop


Many thanks,