[arch-general] Making pacman check multiple repos

[Brendan Long]

For a little while I've been confused because pacman -Syu always said
that everything was up to date (for a week or more). I talked to a
friend at school and he had the same thing happening and I realized
something might be wrong and commented out mirrors one at a time until I
found one with updates (I think easynews is the one I used). The new
update comes with a mirrorlist that doesn't contain the mirror I was
using before (gigenet)

The problem is that there's no warning that something is wrong with the
old mirrors, so I'd like to suggest some sort of test so that if no
updates are found for some amount of time, pacman tries a known good
mirror (like the main one). To save on bandwidth, it might work best to
make it only check the main repo for an updated package list and then
tries the normal mirrors until it finds one with a matching package
list.

I'm not sure how complicated this would be be, or how worthwhile it is
(I suppose Arch users are more likely than most to realize that
something is wrong when updates stop), but I think it would be helpful
to have some sort of test to make sure you're not updating off a
seriously out of date mirror.

-Brendan Long
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