Powerpill -Sy fails but pacman -Sy works

Question

Hi, guys,
I recently got in trouble with pacman and powerpill after we are forced behind a proxy by the uni. I have exported the several proxy env vars, then a strange problem comes out, I could use
pacman -Sy
to sync my pkg db, but I could not with
powerpill -Sy
, it always fails with the error msgs
error: failed retrieving file 'core.db.tar.gz' from ftp.archlinux.org : Transient resolver failure
, so on through every mirror. Anyone could help me with the prob? Thanks.

Answer 1

If the option is commented in the config and not passed on the command line, it always invokes pacman to update the database (when "-y"|"--refresh" are passed).
if ($self->get_value('Rebase'))
$self->maybe_lock_and_rebase(($ys>1));
else
my $cmd = $self->get_value('PacmanBin') . ' -S' . ('y' x $ys);
$cmd = '/usr/bin/sudo '.$cmd if $ENV{'USER'} ne 'root' and -x '/usr/bin/sudo';
system $cmd;
Maybe it seemed like nothing happened because the database was already in sync. Regardless of how it updates the database, powerpill continues with the download before passing control to pacman to complete the operation, if there's anything left to do.
I'm not sure why it worked as expected with the Rebase option but not without. Powerpill uses the Perl's LWP::Simple module to check and retrieve the databases. The module probably detects the proxy settings on its own. I don't know why it wouldn't work when using pacman if you're able to sync the databases directly with pacman. It might be due to missing variables in the environment of the system call to pacman. *shrugs*