Could Arch-based distributions share the same repository?
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My university's mirror server has repositories for Arch and Manjaro but not Hyperbola or Parabola. May I directly use (the free/libre part of) Arch repository for my Parabola installation (for instance)?
> My university's mirror server has repositories for Arch and Manjaro
> but not Hyperbola or Parabola. May I directly use (the free/libre part
> of) Arch repository for my Parabola installation (for instance)?
Unfortunately, Arch does not separate its free and non-free software
into separate repositories like Ubuntu and Debian do. However, you
could manually install Parabola's "your-freedom" package,[1] which
conflicts with every known non-free Arch package. As long as you
manually keep this one package up-to-date, it should prevent you from
accidentally installing any non-free Arch packages. You would not have
access to any of Parabola's modified versions of Arch packages, so it
would not be a FSDG-compliant system, but it would probably be
approximately as free as Debian main.
This would probably work better with Parabola than with Hyperbola.
Hyperbola is just as free as Parabola, but Parabola stays in sync with
Arch whereas Hyperbola is based on a 2017 Arch snapshot. Also,
Hyperbola's "your-freedom" package conflicts with many packages that do
not have any freedom issues, but which the Hyperbola devs consider to be
bloated, less secure, or otherwise undesirable. You might have
different preferences and rather decide for yourself.
[1] https://www.parabola.nu/packages/libre/x86_64/your-freedom/
Thanks for your reply. I may firstly try to contact the maintainers of my university's mirror server and suggest they add repository for Parabola.
UPDATE: I have edited the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file, and then attempted to update the Parabola system (2018-06) to the current. The package "your-freedom" is already in place.
There are several problems making it impractical to use my local university's Arch repository for updating Parabola. The first problem is that Arch has been switching from xz to zstd. Many packages on Arch repository are already in .tar.zst format, so Parabola still has to download those packages in .tar.xz format form its own repository. And second, even if my local Arch mirror server provides many .tar.xz packages which can be downloaded much faster than from any of Parabola mirror servers, it seems that these packages cannot pass the signature verification.
After the unsuccessful attempt, I rolled back the system to the snapshot taken right after installation of the system. I could try to update it slowly (and less frequently) from official Parabola repository.
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