Jeroen Op 't Eynde wrote:
On 12/13/2009 10:02 AM, Nathan Wayde wrote:
On 13/12/09 08:48, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 03:31 -0500, Qadri wrote:
So should it be a function of the program to make sure that happens? Or is a responsibility of the user? Should the functionality be programmed into pacman to make sure that happens, or should we be asking that users be aware of what repos they're using?
Well said, I agree. I believe that if separate db and package downloads are implemented it should not be so users can be 'up-to-the-minute' in packages, but for greater security.
In fact, now that I think about it, having two dbs (one on the mirror with all packages as available on that mirror and one 'master' with a list of authoritative checksums) would make sense, as it fulfils the security aspect well while avoiding the problem of db/package mismatch. The 'master' db would have to have a history of previous checksums as well.
One possible alternative to explicitly storing a history of checksums is to checksum the dbfile, and name it as such. instead of core.db.tar.gz, you'd have have core.[checksum].db.tar.gz and these would be stored for some time on the master. In order to make it secure the standard checksums would have to be upgraded to something with less collisions than md5. Of-course this also raises the question of 'what happens when the master goes down?'.
I'm following this topic, and I a bit with Qadri. I think it should be/stay the responsibility of the user. My solution to get up-to-the-minute packages is very simple: -put ftp.archlinux.org on top of the mirrorlist -do pacman -Sy -comment ftp.archlinux.org out of the mirrorlist -do pacman -Su And then it goes through the list of servers for the latest packages.
Change the way how the mirrors and how updating works is unnecessary IMHO.
ftp.archlinux.org is technically a mirror and is not even the most up to date mirror most of the time...