I have had many such instances of an update breaking something and making me unable to boot, want to avoid such situations. Any help/info is appreciate!
Find better mirrors (which is what the ranking should do) or improve your connectivity if basically everything is failing. I realize that may or may not be possible.
It’s also true that mirrors are used as a distributed system and as long as at least one responds, you’re fine.
Well, if you KNOW (sight unseen), then you can manually edit your mirrrors. Of course if you know that, you probably can just write the binary updates yourself.
Otherwise, reinstall it.
I get issues like this a lot due to how I can connect to the net, I just restart the processs tbh (I know what is causing it, I cant fix it so I just keep trtying lol)
Also keep in mind pacman will try other mirrors when it can’t retrieve a file from a mirror. While I’ve had the occasional mirror failure, I’ve never been left in a partial-upgrade situation since it rolls to the next mirror on the list. Which explains why it’s a list, not a single entry.
Check your pacman log and you’ll see the failed file was actually installed because it was subsequently retrieved from another mirror.