Personally I use reflector like so:
reflector --verbose --country "United States" -l 200 -p http --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
How does this answer the question?
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.
Bonus cookie if you hook it into pacman.
Teach
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.
Right. I personaly run it as part of a script when I clean the pacman cache with the Scc options.
A note about this command: it deletes from the cache all past versions of installed packages and all uninstalled packages. This will prevent downgrading or reinstalling packages without downloading them again. One may prefer using less aggressive options or paccache.
Thanks!
Me too
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.
I hope you find one that works for you! ๐๐
Same here, I don't know the people but I just use my local uni's computer science club cause I just think it's endearing lol
The beloved lightweight distro