I mean when I can take an Arch Linux installation that I forgot about on my server and is now 8 years out of date and simply manually update the key ring and then be up to date
That won’t work, old pacman versions can’t deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.
I mean, if you want to use your system pacman sure. But you can just download the latest statically built pacman to do the large jump without issues. However i will concede that is more than JUST keyring update
Edit: another fun way to get around that issue pretty easily. Boot any up to date arch installer, mount the old ass system root to /mnt and just run
pacman -Sy
pacman --sysroot /mnt
Now just normal syu and the live environment pacman will update the old system, arch/pacman has a plethora of easy ways to get around what would otherwise be show stoppers on apt/dpkg :)
That won’t work, old pacman versions can’t deal with the fact that packages are now zstandard compressed. In fact, the window were you could successful do the update without a whole bunch of additional work was something like a couple of months. Certainly a whole lot less than a year.
I mean, if you want to use your system pacman sure. But you can just download the latest statically built pacman to do the large jump without issues. However i will concede that is more than JUST keyring update
Edit: another fun way to get around that issue pretty easily. Boot any up to date arch installer, mount the old ass system root to /mnt and just run
pacman -Sy
pacman --sysroot /mnt
Now just normal syu and the live environment pacman will update the old system, arch/pacman has a plethora of easy ways to get around what would otherwise be show stoppers on apt/dpkg :)