Update Failure w/ GPME Error

General system Pacman
1

I had not seen this error before it first appeared last week. I decided to just wait a couple of days before making a project out of this, but the problem persists, with both pacman and yay. I have DDG’d the problem and saw one, or two examples of this happening on Arch, but not on Endeavour. For a change, I thought that I would reach out to the grown-ups about a problem, prior to typing a bunch of commands that I don’t fully understand. lol Apparently I need to update the security keys, but if I do it “the Arch way” I’m concerned that not all of Endeavour’s keys will be properly updated.

Thus far I have run Reflector, but that’s about it. When I attempt to update the system with either pacman, or yay, this is the response:

[gumby@newton ~]$ yay -Syu
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 endeavouros is up to date
 core                            128.9 KiB   174 KiB/s 00:01 [--------------------------------] 100%
 extra                             8.3 MiB   814 KiB/s 00:10 [--------------------------------] 100%
 community                        45.0   B  88.0   B/s 00:01 [--------------------------------] 100%
 multilib                        139.5 KiB   154 KiB/s 00:01 [--------------------------------] 100%
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: GPGME error: No data
error: failed to synchronize all databases (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
 -> error refreshing databases - exit status 1
[gumby@newton ~]$

What is the best way to proceed? Thanks in advance!

2

Removing the remote databases and their signatures should help in your case:

sudo rm -r /var/lib/pacman/sync/

then,

sudo pacman -Syu

Also, running yay with -Syu is not necessary. Just yay is sufficient.

Why this happens?

Some mirrors are wrongly configured, broken or the mirror URL in the pacman.conf is set up incorrectly and instead of returning a proper HTTP error they will send actual data (usually some fancy HTML with a textual 404) which pacman will interpret as the signature being available and write it to that *.sig file, pass the same data on to gnupg which then fails to verify the signature since all it got was some “garbage”. That’s when you get that No data error.

9 Likes
3

Thank you for not only providing a solution but also explaining what is happening. Much appreciated!

2 Likes
4

@SnazzySyrup Welcome at the forum!

5

Thanks @ainz, this seems to have resolved my issue. The system appears to be updating normally as I type this. And, as @SemLraug observed, thanks very much for the background info on what causes this sort of thing.

Sincere thanks!

1 Like
6

You’re welcome!

Please take a moment to mark the solution box under the post. This would help others having similar issue to find it more easily.

2 Likes
7

Please mark the post as solution that helped you resolve your issue.

*Update Failure w/ GPME Error - #2 by ainz

5 Likes
8

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.