No terminal will open after system update

[dsoprea]

Well, you’re not wrong. I reproduced it directly from a TTY (tty, not ptty). I reinstalled all of those packages, but it didn’t make a difference. More directly, ldd obviously reported libicuuc.so.70 as being an unresolved dependency, too. It looks like all of the terminals, quite reasonably, use it.

I saw a reference somewhere to lddtree (pax-utils), which is an awesome tool, by the way. This reports that vte3 is what’s directly depending on it (libicuuc):

    libvte-2.91.so.0 => /usr/lib/libvte-2.91.so.0
        libgnutls.so.30 => /usr/lib/libgnutls.so.30
            libp11-kit.so.0 => /usr/lib/libp11-kit.so.0
                libdl.so.2 => /usr/lib/libdl.so.2
            libbrotlienc.so.1 => /usr/lib/libbrotlienc.so.1
            libidn2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libidn2.so.0
            libunistring.so.2 => /usr/lib/libunistring.so.2
            libtasn1.so.6 => /usr/lib/libtasn1.so.6
            libnettle.so.8 => /usr/lib/libnettle.so.8
            libhogweed.so.6 => /usr/lib/libhogweed.so.6
            libgmp.so.10 => /usr/lib/libgmp.so.10
        libicuuc.so.70 => None
        libpcre2-8.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpcre2-8.so.0

Once I saw that, I remembered seeing a mention of it at the end of the original upgrade, and a couple of follow-up upgrades (to see if those prompts were effectively resolved). That vte3 dependency occurred at the end of all of my attempts. However, it stopped appearing, for some reason, shortly afterward, and I’d long forgotten about it.

I then then tried rebuilding that but it was ineffective and I kept getting a non-error erroneous message at the end:

(1/2) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/2) Checking which packages need to be rebuilt
foreign	vte3-git
[dustin@dustinxps 18:19:25 ?=(0) ~]$

Note that the exit-code was (0) (see prompt). I wasn’t aware of what “foreign” meant, but I am now. A custom build. Then it occurred to me that I had installed the gnome-terminal transparency-patch (which is a custom build), and that maybe that was the culprit if maybe one or more of the terminals or their dependencies had done a major release. Clearly libicuuc had. So, I uninstalled my gnome-terminal transparency package. Still, I was stuck using vte3-git, and rebuilding that continued to not help.

I did a complete removal of vte3-git and it’s dependencies (it was manageable; I could just reinstall the few important-looking things after I reinstalled the terminal). I then installed “vte3” (the non-Git package), followed by most of the previously-removed dependencies. I then reinstalled xfce4-terminal and gnome-terminal. Then it worked.

Thank you for your suggestions.

[fbodymechanic]

I’m not going to lie, I’ve only been doing this for a few years so I apologize, I’ve can’t remember ever hearing of a pseudo terminal.

I wouldn’t even know how to get to one.

[dsoprea]

A pseudoterminal is the facility that you interact with when you’re at the prompt using anything other than a fullscreen, native terminal. Such as xfce4-terminal and SSH.

[petsam]

@dsoprea

Thank you for your suggestions.

You should mark @xircon 's post as a solution, which was obviously a partial upgrade.

@xircon

it is looking for 70, 71 is the current, looks like a partial upgrade, either ssh or chroot in and try and update.

[dsoprea]

A number of small details contributed, though, ultimately, it was the customer gnome-terminal build that was the culprit. The system upgrade finished completely but, upon finishing, that one component could no longer find a dependency. That was the principal symptom. The presence of that source-built component was the principal problem.

However, that he/they found and suggested the broken libicuuc dependency in the first place was invaluable and allowed me to move forward. So, I’ve marked it as a solution on account of that. I just want to make sure that anyone else that finds this thread and jumps to the bottom understands what the core problem ended-up being.

[xircon]

And the moral of the story? AUR packages can kill your system Because they do not automatically rebuild after an update.

This is why, using a filesystem, like btrfs with snapper or timeshift is sensible as you can roll back to a snapshot before the system became unusable.

[ricklinux]

I also said it was an improper update probably a partial update right from the beginning.