Rankmirrors not working per documentation

Support Software & Applications
1

It seems like rankmirrors is vastly outdated? Nothing works like in the arch documentation Arch Wiki Mirrors.

For example, this command is supposed to rank all the mirrors, but instead I get this error

$ rankmirrors -n 6 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
Version 4.21.0
USAGE:
 pacman-mirrors [-h] [-f [NUMBER]] [-i [-d]] [-m METHOD] [--status]
                [-c COUNTRY [COUNTRY...] | [--geoip] | [--continent]]
                [-l] [-lc] [-q] [-t SECONDS] [-v] [-n]
                [--api] [-S/-B BRANCH] [-p PREFIX]
                        [-P PROTO [PROTO...]] [-R] [-U URL]
rankmirrors: error: unrecognized arguments: 6 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup

Also, running this without the -n argument (which I dont know if its required) gives this result

$ rankmirrors /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
Version 4.21.0
USAGE:
 pacman-mirrors [-h] [-f [NUMBER]] [-i [-d]] [-m METHOD] [--status]
                [-c COUNTRY [COUNTRY...] | [--geoip] | [--continent]]
                [-l] [-lc] [-q] [-t SECONDS] [-v] [-n]
                [--api] [-S/-B BRANCH] [-p PREFIX]
                        [-P PROTO [PROTO...]] [-R] [-U URL]
rankmirrors: error: unrecognized arguments: /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup

I’ve read that rankmirrors moved to the pacman-contrib repo, so it’s probably the reason it’s outdated? Or something else is going on that I do not quite get.

Edit:

From my understanding, I’m most probably wrong, but it seems like rankmirrors was replaced by pacman-mirrors and rankmirrors is just an alias to it now, even though it is incompatible. But I would need someone to confirm that information.

it seems like now that this is the new way

# OLD: rankmirrors -n 6 mirrorsfile
# NEW: 
pacman-mirrors -f 6
2

Arch wiki contains information for Arch Linux tools.

Pacman Mirrors is not an Arch Linux tool, but rather a Manjaro specific tool.

So check out the Manjaro Wiki page for it:

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Pacman-mirrors#Update_mirrorlist_with_the_fastest_mirrors

PS: rankmirrors is provided by pacman, but is symlinked to pacman-mirrors.

1 Like
3

Thanks! Much appreciated.

I could say, it is a little bit confusing that rankmirrors is an alias to an incompatible to rankmirrors tool. It’s kinda confusing for a user that doesn’t know that rankmirrors is an alias in his system and every forum showing a different incompatible way with the alias itself for using rankmirrors.

Could we probably improve this somehow by … maybe removing the alias? It doesn’t quite make sense to me for the alias to exist at all from that perspective.

Or even adding a note to the user when running the alias informing him that this is not a compatible tool and they should use pacman-mirrors instead would totally help save some time.

4

Removing rankmirrors all together is probably the best solution, as the original command won’t work on Manjaro anyway.

5