Arch Linux's Pacman 6.1 Released With Cache Server Support

[Chugworth]

Mine is just a local HTTP server that hosts packages like a partial mirror. Have some scripts that rsync to server after updates and clear out the local cache. This way if the server is hot around, updating just skips that local sever and moves onto the next. This also allows for retaining older packages in case MESA or some other package has a regression just for a single type of hardware or computer.

Most likely the local cache server will not error out and complain as much when it cannot find the package. I find it best to comment out the partial mirror in the mirrorlist while traveling to remove timeout delays. Will spend time looking into as an alternative to the partial mirror.

pacman is also the package manager used by MSYS2.

I just use the mount option "x-systemd.automount" so it doesn't attempt to mount the path until there is activity there. And of course, I don't try to update when I'm not on the same network as the cache server.

[geearf]

No, what they're talking about is atomicity, i.e. implement a way to ensure that either the transaction happens completely or it doesn't happen at all. The thing is, writing all changes to disk in a separate location and then mv-ing them to place is also prone to the same issues, because what happens if the power loss occurs during the mv operation? Same exact thing.

That's the kind of issue that immutability and A/B partitioning have been created to solve. Write the changes to disk, ensure their integrity, then switch to using them right from where they are, and mark the old files as deprecated.

Now that I think about it, if you were implying CoW snapshots for system restore purposes, like in Btrfs, then CoW would also fit the bill.

Oh I see yes, it's COW but not just for a single file, for a bunch of them. My bad, thanks!
I wonder if that is something the kernel/fs could do. Though as you wrote, it's much simpler when you need to only change one reference/pointer, having to change multiple is hard to make safe.