In fact it wasn't what I thought. In my mirrorlist (Artix mirrorlist, there are a lot fewer mirrors than Arch) I had just thrown in new ones occasionally and deleted old ones manually now and then. But I had an old defunct one left in there, visiting the address gives a 404 error: Server = https://www.uex.dk/public/artix/$repo/os/$arch As it was well down my list it didn't get used until the --arch=686 option forced the whole list to be searched in turn - because there are no i686 package repos, I checked the enabled mirrors one by one in my browser. Now if I put that defunct mirror alone in my mirrorlist (Artix one) then I get the same issue when I do pacman -Syu with no --arch option. It creates all these .sig files with the 404 HTML in them, deleting these .sig files restores normal operation when the mirrorlist is fixed. /var/lib/pacman/sync$ ls community.db extra.db galaxy.db galaxy.db.sig lib32.db lib32.db.sig multilib.db system.db system.db.sig universe.db world.db world.db.sig /var/lib/pacman/sync$ tail -n +1 *.sig ==> galaxy.db.sig <== <html> <head> <title>404 Not found</title> </head> <body> <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center> </body> </html>
==> lib32.db.sig <== <html> <head> <title>404 Not found</title> </head> <body> <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center> </body> </html> ==> system.db.sig <== <html> <head> <title>404 Not found</title> </head> <body> <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center> </body> </html> ==> world.db.sig <== <html> <head> <title>404 Not found</title> </head> <body> <center><h1>404 Not Found</h1></center> </body> </html>
