How would I best go about researching this? I have all the components right here, and it's easy enough to trigger, but I have no experience whatsoever in debugging libraries or C code in general.
I could try and set up a chroot to bisect pacman / lib{fetch,archive,alpm} but I have no clue how good or bad random pacman versions interact with the rest of the system.
What I did to replicate this was create a chroot ie sudo mkdir -p archtest/var/lib/pacman and then test with a large group something like this sudo pacman -Sy gnome --cachedir $(pwd)/archtest/var/cache/pacman/pkg/ -r ./archtest/ if you need to download again you can just purge chroot cachedir. after that I'm not sure how best to debug libfetch possibly using netstat, lsof and strace?