2007/9/7, eliott
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.
This was requested in bugtracker long time ago (probably more than once). See http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5885 for example. Anyway since users are recommended to run rankmirrors script they will get new mirrorlist as .pacnew file and then they'll have to rename it and run rankmirrors script again or modify mirrorlist again. I don't see any difference between fetching new pacman-mirrors package version and updating pacman package. This essentially just moves package update procedure from one package name to another. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)