Zypper parallel downloads become default and mirrorlist settings

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1

For everyone who is not following the e-mail lists:

With the upcoming zypper version 1.14.90 and libzypp 17.37.1 (so I guess with the next Tumbleweed snapshot) parallel downloads will become the default for zypper. Therefore the usage of environment variables for that purpose will apparently not be necessary anymore.

Also I would like to quote the following from Benjamin Zeller’s message:

Recommended configuration (For Best Performance & Reliability):

While the automatic mode is a great improvement, we strongly recommend
manually configuring your repositories for the most robust experience.
Please take a moment to perform the following two steps on your
repository files (located in /etc/zypp/repos.d/):

  1. Replace baseUrl= with mirrorlist=. This tells Zypper to fetch a list
    of available mirrors. You can form the mirrorlist URL by simply
    appending /?mirrorlist to the baseUrl.
    IMPORTANT: Make sure there is a trailing slash (/) before the
    ?mirrorlist part.
    Example: https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ becomes
    https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/?mirrorlist
    Note: If you used a metalink entry like we suggested in the previous
    mail, this is still supported as well.

  2. Explicitly specify the GPG key URL with gpgkey=. This enhances
    security by ensuring the repository’s signing key is always fetched
    directly from the official server.

For further details just read the mailing list link.

I am really looking forward to it.

1 Like
2

And apparently you are supposed to do the ‘mirrorlist=’ change after upgrade to libzypp 17.37.1 ?

3

Not necessarily. I did the changes beforehand, then noting that libzypp 17.37.2 is indeed in snapshot 20250531 I did:

zypper ref
zypper up zypper libzypp

to have the new version, then did the usual zypper dup and took advantage of the parallel downloads, much welcome since the current snapshot is a big one.

4

That’s quite interesting, since I did the mirrorlist= change beforehand, and for me ‘zypper ref’ only said repo metadas were up-to-date, and I could not update any packages.

Then doing ‘zypper ref --force’ and I got errors that the repo information is not valid.

So I had to go back to the previous ‘baseUrl=’ for upgrading.

So my experience is that the mirrorlist thing did not work before libzypp upgrade. Are you sure you didn’t already have the repo metadata for libzypp 17.37.2 before your change and update?

5

There are problems with (some) mirrors atm, maybe you are affected as well, see for instance
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/repository-invalid-abd-gpg-key-expired/185423
https://forums.opensuse.org/t/20250531-downgrading-all-packages-and-wants-to-install-older-ones/185404/28