[pacman-dev] "pacman --arch=i686 -Syu" results in "error: GPGME error: No data"

Thu Jun 3 19:54:36 UTC 2021

In fact it wasn't what I thought. In my mirrorlist (Artix mirrorlist, there are a lot fewer mirrors than Arch) I had just thrown in new ones occasionally and deleted old ones manually now and then. But I had an old defunct one left in there, visiting the address gives a 404 error:
Server = https://www.uex.dk/public/artix/$repo/os/$arch
As it was well down my list it didn't get used until the --arch=686 option forced the whole list to be searched in turn - because there are no i686 package repos, I checked the enabled mirrors one by one in my browser. Now if I put that defunct mirror alone in my mirrorlist (Artix one) then I get the same issue when I do pacman -Syu with no --arch option.
It creates all these .sig files with the 404 HTML in them, deleting these .sig files restores normal operation when the mirrorlist is fixed.
/var/lib/pacman/sync$ ls
community.db  extra.db  galaxy.db  galaxy.db.sig  lib32.db  lib32.db.sig  multilib.db  system.db  system.db.sig  universe.db  world.db  world.db.sig
/var/lib/pacman/sync$ tail -n +1 *.sig
==> galaxy.db.sig <==
<html>
<head>
<title>404 Not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

==> lib32.db.sig <==
<html>
<head>
<title>404 Not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

==> system.db.sig <==
<html>
<head>
<title>404 Not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

==> world.db.sig <==
<html>
<head>
<title>404 Not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center>
</body>
</html>