Arch Linux

toastbrot97

Member

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Updating keys: pacman-key --refresh-keys vs archlinux-keyr...

What is the difference between

pacman-key --refresh-keys

and

archlinux-keyring-wkd-sync

?

After looking at the scripts it seems that both look up the same keys.
Then pacman-key first tries to locate the keys in a WKD and then potentially to refresh them while the wkd-sync script only tries WKD.

Is there any substantial difference that I need to care about as an enduser?

In the same vein I'm wondering if

sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring

would be equivalent to the other options or whether this maybe only includes some official keys?

Last edited by toastbrot97 (2023-10-29 10:10:32)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 57,541

Re: [SOLVED] Updating keys: pacman-key --refresh-keys vs archlinux-keyr...

"sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring" updates the database and sets up up for a partial update, the other one is https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … issues/187
archlinux-keyring-wkd-sync is mostly meant to be invoked by the timer so users won't run into signature errors when updating after toomuch™ delay (ie. when a new key became hot since the last update, there was a phase where this caused frequent issues)

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toastbrot97

Member

Registered: 2023-10-28

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Updating keys: pacman-key --refresh-keys vs archlinux-keyr...

Thanks for linking the issue. I guess I can conclude from this that I don't need to worry about outdated keys as long as the systemd timer invoking archlinux-keyring-wkd-sync regularly is active (as it is by default). So I hopefully never need to use the other commands or in fact run any of them manually anyway.
Ideally pacman will at some point update existing keys on its own.