How to fix pacman out of sync with glibc?

Question

I seem to have made a dumb move with an Arch Linux installation on one of my desktop PCs: I upgraded pacman (using pacman -S pacman), but without upgrading anything else. Now pacman won't run, as it is out of sync with the GLIBC version.

I am not sure what is the best way to fix this, since I need to roll back pacman (plus a couple of other dependent packages), but I can't use pacman to do it, since it's not working. I have the previous version packages in the pacman cache and I have at least one back-up alternative root partition on the machine, so perhaps there is some way to fix using a chroot from there?

Can anyone advise on what is the best way to fix this issue?

Answer 1

Note that, on Arch Linux, partial upgrades are not supported; you should always upgrade the whole system at once (pacman -Syu).
pacman -S package would install the version of package that is currently in your sync database, likely reinstalling the already installed version.
pacman -Sy followed by pacman -S package would update the sync database and then install the latest version of package and its dependencies, possibly breaking other installed packages that depend on older versions of the latter.
As noted in the wiki page linked above, pacman -Syuw followed by pacman -S package is not a solution either.

to fix it do the following:

1. Download pacman-static binary with wget
2. wget https://pkgbuild.com/~morganamilo/pacman-static/x86_64/bin/
3. chmod +x ./pacman-static
4. sudo ./pacman-static -Syu
5. Clean all occurrences of pacman from /usr/local/ find them with whereis pacman