I’ve been playing with some ways of giving more control over the update process, thinking more along the lines of the “roll-up” approach I took with manjaro32:
| Step |
Action |
| 1 |
Sync from arch32 to unstable |
| 2 |
Snap to testing |
| 3 |
Sync to unstable |
| 4 |
Repeat… |
| 5 |
Snap from testing to stable |
This meant the branches were quite often in sync but it required manual intervention.
So, I’m now playing with the following pattern:
current is synced multiple times per day from Arch stable (like, every hour or half-hour).
daily is snapped every day, daily-deferred is the repo from yesterday.
weekly is snapped every week, weekly-deferred is the repo from last week.
Any thoughts?
Update:
In case anyone is interested, I have set up https://repo.m2x.dev/. Pick a cadence and add to/set as your /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist:
Server = https://repo.m2x.dev/current/$repo/$arch
I won’t pretend that i understand all variables going into process, especially consequences of any approach except current.
But from user perspective - idea of having weekly update cycle sounds to me like a good one! 
A major kernel version update or an update to xorg could make one of my computers unbootable since I use nvidia-390xx drivers from the AUR. So I would have to wait before updating until the AUR package gets updated, but this could be a problem if I wanted to install new software (or if I simply forgot and just updated without thinking about it). So I think this could potentially be very useful to people like me. I could use weekly-deferred and in that week, and update to the AUR package is bound to occur, so I would just update everything at once.
It would, at least, remove one thing to think about. It would dull the bleeding edge just slightly, so to speak…
OK, I’ve set up https://repo.m2x.dev/ :
repo.m2x.dev
There are five update strands:
- current - Synchronised hourly with Arch stable; an Arch mirror.
- daily - Updated once per day.
- daily-deferred - Updated once per day, yesterday’s state.
- weekly - Updated every Tuesday.
- weekly-deferred - Updated every Tuesday, last week’s state.
Use this as your /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist , replacing $strand with one of the values above:
Server = https://repo.m2x.dev/$strand/$repo/$arch
Note: things will get messy if you mix cadences (e.g. daily with Arch mirrors).
Update cadence
The update cadence looks something like this:
Note that updates to current are more frequent than the image suggests.
Signing key
I may occasionally fast-track an update I want on all my machines.
sudo pacman-key --recv-key 9C08A255442FAFF0 && sudo pacman-key --lsign 9C08A255442FAFF0
Package sources
Arch package sources can be found on https://www.archlinux.org/packages/
Overlaid package sources will appear on GitLab, https://gitlab.com/m2x.dev/overlay/
Fix link here, there’s : inside the link so it’s 404 on click 
Current … Daily … Daily-Deferred … Weekly … Weekly Deferred … sounds like the frenetic cadence of modern life! No time! Busy … sometime have to fast track. 
You and your silly stability stuff. I really prefer to just randomly -Syu and just see what happens.
-Syy, -Syu go on about my business…
I mean. . . if we want to get technical, I really just type topgrade then password and go make a drink and when I come back, I get to find out if I’m hitting the forum, or hitting the wiki and restoring from timeshift.
OK, so I made the firewall rules permanent so now it’s accessible to people other than me if/when the server reboots… 