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pacman-mirrors

Build Status

Package that provides all mirrors for Manjaro Linux.

  • Free software: GPL license

Features

  • Generate a new mirror list by using several options:
    • method: rank or random.
    • branch: stable, testing or unstable.
    • country: a single, a list or all.
    • fasttrack: updated and responsive mirrors
    • geoip: mirrors for country if available
  • A GUI for selecting the mirrors to used to generate a custom list.

How does fasttrack work

First of all, a working internet connection is mandatory. Pacman-Mirrors always checks if network is online. It is doing so by pinging google with 3 packets.

The following arguments -c -i -m --geoip will not work in conjunction with -f.

Question:

So, pacman-mirrors -f 2 takes the same time to create /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist as pacman-mirrors -f 20?

Answer:

No. pacman-mirors -f 2 will be faster than pacman-mirrors -f 20 since only 2 mirrors are probed vs 20 mirrors but since most mirrors respond within the first second it is barely noticeable.

Question:

pacman-mirrors -f n always ranks ALL mirrors by response time (the same as pacman-mirrors -g does) and additionally takes up-to-date mirrors and writes only n mirrors to /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist?

Answer:

No. pacman-mirrors -f n ranks on a sorted list with known up-to-date mirrors. Thus it is only the first n mirrors from this list which are actually probed. If you have a list of 30 mirrors which are uptodate and use -f 5 only the top 5 mirrors are probed and then sorted after response time. The switch does not guarantee you get the n fastest mirrors only that they are responsive and uptodate. Mirrors which have network errors or times out are not considered at all.

Beware

The smaller number you choose to write to the mirrorlist will increase the possibility of not getting a responsive mirror since only the first n in the list are tested not all of them.

A reasonable number is between 5 and 10.

The force of this approach is that we know forehand if the mirror is uptodate and thus only have to rank n mirrors from the mirrors known to be uptodate.

If you need a complete ranking then pacman-mirrors -g is the way to go.

Technologies

pacman-mirrors is build with Python and Gtk3.