Current, Daily, Weekly, Deferred mirror setup

[jonathon]

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

[anon379864]

Rarely.

[keybreak]

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!

[Kresimir]

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…

[jonathon]

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/

[keybreak]

@jonathon

OK, I’ve set up https://repo.m2x.dev/:

Fix link here, there’s : inside the link so it’s 404 on click

[ricklinux]

Current … Daily … Daily-Deferred … Weekly … Weekly Deferred … sounds like the frenetic cadence of modern life! No time! Busy … sometime have to fast track.

[fbodymechanic]

You and your silly stability stuff. I really prefer to just randomly -Syu and just see what happens.

[BONK]

-Syy, -Syu go on about my business…

[fbodymechanic]

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.

[jonathon]

OK, so I made the firewall rules permanent so now it’s accessible to people other than me if/when the server reboots…