pacmimi 1.0.0

Use case

A concrete use case for such an utility is the following:

• The pacman package manager uses a mirrorlist file containing available package mirrors. That file is provided and updated by the Arch Linux package pacman-mirrorlist.

• The mirrorlist file needs to be edited by the user in order to enable (uncomment) at least one mirror. Personally, I enable multiple mirrors and change their order so that faster mirrors come first.

• When the pacman-mirrorlist package is updated, pacman won’t override the mirrorlist file with the updated version if it has been edited by the user (which will always be the case). Instead, the new version is saved as mirrorlist.pacnew.

• The user thus needs to manually compare both mirrorlist files and merge the changes from the new mirrorlist.pacnew file into his locally modified copy of mirrorlist while keeping his modifications.

• An easy way to do this is to just replace the local copy with the updated mirrorlist and enable and reorder the correct mirrors all over again, but that gets tedious fast.

The last point is where pacmimi comes in. pacmimi relieves you of that tedious work – it removes mirrors which are not available anymore from your local mirrorlist and adds newly added mirrors as disabled (commented) entries. At the same time, it keeps your enabled mirrors and their order (it will, however, remove those enabled mirrors which are not present anymore in the new mirrorlist).

Installation

To install pacmimi, use pip:

pip install pacmimi

Quick start

1. Execute the following command:

   sudo pacmimi -s /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist*

2. This will merge your mirrorlist and mirrorlist.pacnew files and remove mirrorlist.pacnew when it’s done. It backups the original mirrorlist to /etc/pacman.d/_orig_mirrorlist before modifying it.

See pacmimi -h for available options. The -s (--sane-defaults) option used above enables useful default options.