when i run yay i am seeing pacnew file warning. i read on arch wiki that a pacnew file is generated when we upgrade a system. my question is what to do wih it?
I am able to see diff by pacdiff they are related to mirrors. should i merge it? overwrite it? what to do here? and how do i know which is best way?.
I tried to merge it i am getting unable to find base package message.
I am using i3 and xfce and a battery manager is there like power saver perofrmance and balanced.
i noticed even in power saver battery is draining fast. Is there any tool that can help with managing battery
When it comes to mirrorlists, the best way in my experience is to let a tool manage them. There are many of them, the most popular is reflector, but I really like rate-mirrors:
rate-mirrors arch | sudo tee /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
I do this once or twice a year, when I notice pacman downloading updates slowly. I just delete pacnew files pertaining to mirrorlists.
Other pacnew files you should probably take more seriously than the ones regarding mirrorlists. If you mess up your mirrorlist, you can easily restore it manually, by using this website: https://archlinux.org/mirrorlist/
Regarding battery, the tool for that is tlp. You should read up on that on the Arch wiki. There is a GUI for it in the AUR called tlpui. It’s not trivial to setup. I manage without it, but that’s just me.
As the EndeavourOS mirrorlist is much smaller than the Arch mirrorlist, it is advisable to at least check for new nearby mirrors every time endeavouros-mirrorlist is updated.
The latest mirror that was added exists in India, which is our first mirror in the country.
@rocksj
And about pacdiff, we have the eos-pacdiff app that makes it slightly easier to see the differences and do merging.
However, please note that merging stuff with any .pacnew file must be done with care, and some of the .pacnew files are not even meant to be merged!
So if there’s any doubt what can be merged, please come to the forum and ask for advice.
Since the endeavouros repo is so small, and the updates are fairly rare, I think it is pointless to try to maintain and optimise your endeavouros-mirrorlist. You waste much more time doing that, than you gain by speeding up the downloads a bit. So, I only fix it when it breaks, and I advise everyone to do the same and not worry about it.
Arch mirrorlist is quite different, it’s a good idea to keep it somewhat optimised. But again, I only do that when I notice the decrease in speed.
Like I said, I never bother with pacnew files for mirrorlists. I just delete them without even looking at them.
When it comes to merging pacnew files (for stuff other than mirrorlists), I also do it in the simplest way possible: I open each file in an instance of text editor tiled side by side, and see what is different. Then I manually edit my old config file to reflect the changes in the pacnew. I always invest some effort to understand what I am editing, I never do it without having a clue what’s going on.
For your case (=location) that is easy to do and probably works well since many good mirrors are near.
For Asian users (e.g. after the new Indian mirror) the case may be quite different.
But as you say, the Arch mirrorlist changes seldom cause any pacdiff merging. Many other .pacnew files can contain useful changes, and it is a good idea to check them (and handle with care, as mentioned above).
