[arch-general] Making pacman check multiple repos

[Rogutės Sparnuotos]

Aaron Griffin (2009-12-11 15:38):
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Brendan Long <korin43 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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 seriously out of date mirror.
> 
> Well, technically there's nothing "wrong" with the mirror. No one
> defined "matching archlinux.org exactly" to be "right".
> 
> That said, there was some discussion in the past to use one server for
> DB files and another for packages. That'd cover this case here - get
> the db files from archlinux.org and use other servers for packages.

Having DB files in a central place would do much trust wise. Currently,
one has to totally trust a mirror, because a mirror has total control
over the contents of binary packages and their checksums. But I guess this
is what the past discussion was about?

-- 
--  Rogutės Sparnuotos