As it currently stands, in order to update the files in pacman.d are only updated on a pacman rel bump. This requires pacman to update its version to push any mirror list changes out. My proposal is to have a pacman-mirrors.pkg.tar.gz package. This way, pacman can get more dynamic mirror list updates, without having to version bump pacman itself (or rel bump). pacman-mirrors would take ownership of the /etc/pacman.d/ directory and the associated mirror files in there. This would allow people to keep their own mirrors at the top of the list, while proving new .pacnew files that people can merge across if they want. pacman would need pacman-mirrors as a dep I suppose. Anyway, it is just an idea, and would require minimal changes to pacman itself, while still giving the ability for dynamic repository updates without version bumping pacman itself.