Update Arch Linux without Unnecessary Bloated Package

Update Arch Linux without unnecessary bloated package.

I’m not sure if this long weekend is really a holiday, because I have so much to do. So I don’t have hours of time just to update my computer.

I also have limited bandwith. Actually my broadband connection is quite fast, but shared with my family. I don’t want to hog all the bandwith.

But I hey, I’m still a geek, I have no life, and I would like to sync (update and upgrade) my computer regularly. Let’s have some fun with /etc/pacman.conf. Open your favorite editor, e.g. nano or vim, and let’s have a look at the IgnorePkg option.

Before you do, you might want to know what size of package that your pacman (package manager) need to download with VerbosePkgLists option.

# Misc options
VerbosePkgLists

Pacman command will show you the size of package like in the first picture below. In this case I typed shorter version here. These packages are always be sync’ed frequently. To frequent that they become annoying.

extra/chromium               44.41 MiB     
extra/libreoffice-fresh      89.31 MiB
extra/libreoffice-fresh-sdk  22.07 MiB
core/linux                   57.38 MiB
core/linux-firmware          34.08 MiB
extra/mariadb                13.82 MiB

Total Download Size:    268.16 MiB

There is no need to sync ‘em all right! Since we want to ignore it, add these line to /etc/pacman.conf as shown in second picture below. Do not forget to save it.

IgnorePkg   = linux
IgnorePkg   = linux-firmware
IgnorePkg   = firefox
IgnorePkg   = chromium
IgnorePkg   = opera
IgnorePkg   = mariadb
IgnorePkg   = libreoffice-fresh
IgnorePkg   = libreoffice-fresh-sdk

The result of pacman -Syu is shown in the third picture.

community/catfish        0.13 MiB
extra/gnucash            4.56 MiB
extra/libinput           0.08 MiB
extra/libwnck3           0.37 MiB
extra/ntp                1.71 MiB
extra/protobuf-c         0.09 MiB
community/stunnel        0.16 MiB

Total Download Size:     7.09 MiB

Now, if there still to many package to be synchronized, you can limit pacman with these option in /etc/pacman.conf.

XferCommand = /usr/bin/curl --limit-rate 33k -C - -f %u > %o
XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget --limit-rate 33K --passive-ftp -c -O %o %u

Happy Sync.