[arch-general] pacman mirrorlist update

[Eli Schwartz]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Francis Gerund <ranrund at gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay, thanks guys.
>
> I will continue to do:
>
> sudo reflector --verbose --country 'United States' -l 200 -p http --sort
> rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
>
> frequently, and then update (very frequently) as usual, by:
>
> sudo pacmatic -Syyuv
>
> And I will delete etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew, RSN.
>
> I don't know what the purpose of the pacman-mirrorlist -20150618-1 update
> was. Maybe the idea was to encourage people to "freshen up" their
> mirrorlist more often.
>
> But since that seems to require manually merging from
> etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew,
> might that be counterproductive?  I am not saying it's wrong - just a
> thought.
>

There's no reason to force pacman to redownload up-to-date databases, in
fact if you get a slow mirror there can be times when you end up with
packages trying to downgrade. The only time I ever forced database sync is
when I got a corrupted database due to WiFi hotspot splash screens.
(They get downloaded because the datestamp is that second or thereabouts,
certainly newer than the repo database. I *usually* remember to sign in
with a curl script first thing.)

As for the mirrorlist, not everyone uses reflector, and the ones who don't
SHOULD get their mirrorlist updated, if not from reflector then through the
package. Yes they will have to manually merge it in. That is why pacman
warns them that a pacnew file was created -- as a general rule of thumb,
people should look at those.
pacman-mirrorlist gets semi-frequent updates. I ignore them, and
occasionally delete them with pacdiffviewer if I feel like it -- because I
know that is one of the handful of expected .pacnew files that are
meaningless.

-- Eli Schwartz