Pacman on Obarun¶
Pacman behaves exactly as it does on Arch. Read the
Arch Wiki page for how to use it.
This page covers only what Obarun changes in /etc/pacman.conf.
The Obarun differences¶
Beyond the repository list and its order, three settings differ from Arch's shipped configuration.
systemd is held back¶
Some Arch packages still declare a dependency on systemd. IgnorePkg means
that if one is ever pulled in, pacman will not upgrade it out from under you.
systemd files are not extracted¶
Where an Arch package ships systemd units or libraries alongside the parts you actually want, those files are dropped at install time rather than landing on your disk.
Signature level¶
The Obarun repositories are signed and required to be. The Arch repositories are
included with SigLevel = DatabaseOptional.
The Obarun keys come from the obarun-keyring package. If pacman complains
about unknown or untrusted keys after an install, populate the keyring:
After an upgrade of pacman¶
When pacman is upgraded and its packaged configuration differs from the one on your disk, pacman writes the new one beside yours instead of overwriting it:
Compare it against your file and merge what matters, particularly the repository
list. Leaving .pacnew files unmerged is how a system slowly drifts away from
the distribution.
Hooks¶
Obarun ships pacman hooks of its own, in the usual place. The one you will meet
is obsysusers.hook, which applies sysusers.d declarations without systemd.
Mirrors¶
/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist covers the Arch repositories only. Pacman uses
the first uncommented server and only falls back to the next one on failure, so
put the mirrors closest to you at the top.
The Obarun repositories carry a Server line of their own and are served
from a single host, cloud.server.obarun.org. There is no mirrorlist for them,
and that is not a design decision: nobody has offered to mirror them.
Mirrors welcome
If you run a machine with the bandwidth and the disk to spare, and you are
willing to keep a copy of obcore, obextra, observice and
obcommunity in sync, the project will take you up on it. Say so on the
forum or write to contact@obarun.org.
Users far from the single host feel the distance on every pacman -Syu, and
one host is also a single point of failure. This is one of the more useful
things a community member can contribute without writing a line of code.