Package Management on The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Fixing package download performance problems in Manjaro Linux

Timo Geusch — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 09:14:25 +0000

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 a new URL

Timo Geusch — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 07:22:42 +0000

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.

I finally started using ELPA

Timo Geusch — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 08:00:32 +0000

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.