Arch Linux

Summary and Info:

If the repository sync fails (e.g. you're behind a captive portal) then "pacman -Sy" stops working.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Go behind a captive portal (where downloading any file results in receiving a HTTP redirect to a login page.)
2. Run "pacman -Sy"
3. Receive error: error: failed retrieving file 'core.db.sig' from [xxx] : expected download size exceeded
4. Log in to the portal (so downloads work again)
5. Run "pacman -Sy"
6. Pacman will never try to re-download the failed repository, even though it's in an invalid state (missing signature, repo file corrupted as it contains a HTML login page instead). Pacman will thus always fail when trying to update software, as the repo file is corrupt. With the sync never updating the corrupted repo file, and pacman refusing to run, pacman becomes unusable.

It would be nice if, upon sync failure, that repository file was removed so that the next "pacman -Sy" would try to download it again.

At the moment, a workaround of "pacman -Syy" does resolve the problem, although it does re-download the other repositories that were not corrupted by the original sync.