On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Teran McKinney wrote:

Hey,

While revamping eleutherNet's ( http://eleuther.net ) DNS setup and giving it external IPv6 connectability, I found Pacman's sync server resolving method to be problematic during testing. Pacman 3.2.0 seems to only try the primary nameserver when resolving a server to sync to. The common (though not completely ideal) practice for using internal domains in VPNs is making the internal DNS server your primary and keeping your normal nameserver as secondary for resolving "real" domains after the VPN's DNS server fails to resolve the domain. Almost all applications will try to resolve through the whole nameserver list if there are no matches initially, but Pacman does not seem to.do this.

Pacman is an awesome package manager, but having either optional or standard functionality for this would be nice.

First this is not really pacman's fault, but maybe the download library it uses : libdownload (forked from freebsd libfetch). You can always try using XferCommand for using an external file download. See man pacman.conf Anyway, I don't know anything about this, but I would have thought download libraries or programs did not have to deal directly with this DNS stuff, and that it was done at a lower level.