Arch wiki page on reflector states that:
Make sure the resulting /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist does not contain entries that you consider untrustworthy before syncing or updating with pacman.
The question is, how should I know if a mirror is trustworthy or not?
Personally I use reflector like so:
reflector --verbose --country "United States" -l 200 -p http --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Reflector relies on ArchLinux mirror status but limit the list you will end up using based on options like the country. This can already limit the “risk” even though the mirrors only grant you access to the packages so it’s basically a list of URL.
The risk will be to install untrusted packages or use “Siglevel=Never” if you have allowed such things in your system. Similarly if you use AUR it’s highly recommended to check the PKGBUILD before installation.
Assuming you mean teach you how this is done? If so, it would appear that hooking into pacman is no longer the best way to do this (TBF, my Arch installs run for many years without reinstall so I’m not always up to date on best practices lol). Seems that setting up reflector as a systemd timer is now the preferred method.
Well, mine is the university five minutes from my neighborhood, and I basically know the people who run it. So it’s pretty obvious to me, personally. I just picked that one manually and deleted all the others (kept a few that were closest to me geographically, but commented-out, as backup if something were to go wrong).
I’m just using the kernel.org mirror for now but I should look into unis too. Good idea.
