Arch Linux: CA Certificates Failed to Commit Transaction

Can’t help myself but to post yet another example of a hands-on KISS approach in Arch Linux where the “simple” part is missing…

System Update

Yet another system update that turned into a dejavu, with a slight difference.

The update of CA certificates-related package, issued on 7 Mar 2017, failed as follows:

$ pacman -Syu
...
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
ca-certificates-utils: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Googled for an official help, but found only:

• this discussion and
• a bug report.

Luckily, the community helped itself within the bug report with the following solution:

$ pacman -Syu --ignore ca-certificates-utils
$ pacman -S --force ca-certificates-utils

… and including the alternative that came a lot later as an official confirmation.

---

The Official Confirmation

On 15 Mar 2017, a week after the package was distributed, the community got finally an official confirmation within the so called “news” section (pun intended) including the following instructions:

$ pacman -Syuw                           # download packages
$ rm /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt  # remove conflicting file
$ pacman -Su                             # perform upgrade

Arch Linux is a tough playground. Beware, behold and KISS!