My adventures with Manjaro Linux continue and I’ve even moved my “craptop” - a somewhat ancient Lenovo X240 that I use as a semi-disposable travel laptop - from XUbuntu to Manjaro Linux. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Today, I wanted to write about package download performance issues I started encountering on my desktop recently and how I managed to fix them.

I was trying to install terminator this morning and kept getting errors from Pamac that the downloads timed out. Looking at the detailed output, I noticed it was trying to download the packages from a server in South Africa, which isn’t exactly in my neighbourhood. Pamac doesn’t appear to have an obvious way to update the mirror list like the Ubuntu flavours do, but a quick dive into the command line helped me fix the issue.

MELPA has recently got its own domain (melpa.org) so it’s time to update your list of package repositories with the new URL.

Speaking of MELPA, I recently switched to their stable repository instead of their “regular” nightly build/snapshot repository after I accidentally ended up with a cider build that didn’t want to playing ball. This is not a complaint - if you use nightly builds etc you know what you’re getting yourself into - but it prompted me to switch over to using the stable package repository instead on those machines that I consider production machines. This of course require me to uninstall and reinstall a bunch of packages but that only took a few minutes.

My normal development workflow doesn’t use that many different Emacs packages. With a few exceptions I’ve mainly worked with a “stock” Emacs distribution and augmented that with a few select Emacs packages that I downloaded manually. It worked for me for a decade or so, and it made it reasonable easy to move configurations between machines - zip & copy was my friend for that, although I’ve since changed that to using dropbox.