Hi, This message is more of a sounding board for me to get the issues surrounding this sorted and point out what I am planning to do. But any comments on this would also be appreciated. Especially #3 below. Issue I see currently and in the future with signed databases: 1) Currently the repo dbs are updated just like downloading a package file. If the update is started and canceled part way though, you get a repo.db.part file which pacman attempts to continue downloading. However, unlike package files, this file is not static content and so we should never continue the download. See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15657 . This can be handled by just deleting the repo.db.part file if present, but it might be better just never create .part files in the first place for repo dbs by downloading to a temporary location and moving/deleting based on successful completion. That would mean having a different download function for repo dbs and packages. See #2 for additional reasons to split this... 2) Database signing. Currently the code downloads the database, deletes the old now invalid signature, then downloads the new signature. If the signature is valid, then all is fine. However, if it fails to download or is invalid, pacman issues an error about failing to update the database. The database on your system is now not correctly signed (which is bad given its signature is only checked on update...). I think that the old database and signature should only be overwritten if the new database download is successful _and_ its signature is valid. This requires downloading the database and its signature to a temporary location and then moving the files only once they are confirmed valid. That would require a different download interface for package and database downloads, but that is a good thing as we can get rid of the force crap from the one used for packages. 3) pacman -Syy behavior. Instead of adding a "force" flag to overwrite the old database, would it be better to just delete the old database first? Currently, if you use pacman -Syy and a database download fails, you are left with the old sync database you told pacman to get rid of. Is leaving pacman with no database for that repo a better solution? I'm not sure about #3... But to fix #1 and #2, I think we need to split the download handling for dbs and packages slightly unless someone has a better idea of how to deal with those? Allan