Cache lists


We've already seen how updating works when you install a package from a cache and the contents of a cache changes. There is a simple feature in Pacman 3 that lets you solve two common types of problem that can come up:

  1. If the caches that you install from are numerous and/or volatile you may not know when you should actually take available updates.
  2. Cache managers sometimes make entirely new versions of caches for major software changes. Is there a way of "switching caches" so that you update from a new cache or set of caches?
The simple feature is making a file containing a list of caches and using that file as if it was a cache. The simplest version of this is the trusted.caches file that pacman makes for you in each installation area. Notice that you can do
% pacman -lc trusted.caches
and
% pacman -l trusted.caches:nEdit -d src
to see what we mean. Similarly, any file ending in .caches on your local system or at a remote site can be treated as a single cache. For example, make a file called ~yourname/test.caches containing:
#
#  test
#
BU
Pacman
and do
% pacman -get ~yourname/test.caches:nEdit
% pacman -d up -l
and you will see something like
[*] nEdit, update from [~yourname/test.caches]
Since you've installed nEdit from ~yourname/test.caches instead of directly from BU, the cache ~yourname/test.caches is tested for updates. This shows that your package nEdit originally comes from the cache BU but the cache ~yourname/test.caches is tested for updates.


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