I have a local need to restrict the automatic update of endeavouros-mirrorlist: Normally I download the latest mirrorlist separately, every week or so, and manually inspect and edit out specific entries, and save, and then run sudo pacman -Syu, usually followed by yay -Syu and yay -Scc. Today, after starting pacman, I noticed that endeavouros/endeavouros-mirrorlist is being included near the top of the package list (old ver: 4.11.1, new ver: 4.12-1).
I update almost daily. I would rather that there was just a notification of my version vs any new version, so I could simply decide whether or not to abort the installation, and manually update the mirrors, or continue without any automatic overwrite of my version of endeavouros-mirrorlist. I need to know which mirrors are changing, and be able to restrict the list, before any updates are made.
I thought this automatic update of mirrors was only available when you execute sudo pacman -Syy, not -Syu.
I have read through Wiki entries on pacman and mirrors, and might have missed something. I thought maybe I could download the mirrorlist from the update button on the Welcome App first, and then maybe the pacman -Syu wouldn’t include it, but wasn’t sure if there was a better way. How can I best disable this automatic update of the endeavouros-mirrorlist? Are there other solutions? Thank you.
When there is an update to the mirrorlist, it is saved as a .pacnew file (check: /etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist.pacnew). At your convenience, you may review the new mirrorlist and merge any changes you wish to adopt into your mirrorlist file with meld or whatever diff program you prefer.
The mirrorlist update shouldn’t overwrite your mirrorlist if you have modified it. It should be safe to let the package update if I am understanding what you are trying to accomplish. As @BluishHumility points out, it will create a pacnew file which you can decide how to handle when you are ready.
There’s the utility checkupdates which will tell you which updates are available.
Also, for AUR packages, you may use command yay -Qua for checking what the updates are.
In addition, to keep specific EndeavourOS mirrors as first during ranking, you can set ALWAYS_FIRST_EOS_MIRRORS in file /etc/eos-rankmirrors.conf to list the preferred mirrors in the order you want.
Probably you want to see the value of EOS_AUTO_MIRROR_RANKING as well.
And, as mentioned above, eos-rankmirrors should create a .pacnew file as the ranking result. You can use eos-pacdiff to see and possibly merge the changes of your choice.
Thank you everybody, for the excellent and trusted explanations.
(And I now understand the “warning: /etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist installed as /etc/pacman.d/endeavouros-mirrorlist.pacnew”)