Hm… so I restored snapshot 2405 (the one before the update this morning) and rebooted.
This got me an “Unable to mount /boot” and I was dropped into emergency mode. So live ISO ==> cachy-chroot and pacman -Syu.
Which got me
again, because yup, there actually is no such file in that snapshot:
ls -la /.snapshots/2405/snapshot/etc/pacman.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6568 12. Apr 14:51 cachyos-mirrorlist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3729 12. Apr 00:17 cachyos-mirrorlist-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6631 12. Apr 14:51 cachyos-v3-mirrorlist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3828 12. Apr 00:17 cachyos-v3-mirrorlist-backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6631 12. Apr 14:51 cachyos-v4-mirrorlist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3828 12. Apr 00:17 cachyos-v4-mirrorlist-backup
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 528 16. Apr 07:02 gnupg
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2. Jun 2025 hooks
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 26908 6. Apr 10:12 mirrorlist-backup
Same is true for all snapshots between 2403 and 2409. I have no idea what happened where.
So, I copied a mirrorlist from a snapshot that had one, ran pacman -Syu (after removing /var/lib/pacman/db.lck because whatevers) and here I am again.
Still no clue why mirrorlist was gone in that many snapshots and frankly, I just don’t want to research this any further. Too much time was spent already.
I guess that something did a mv mirrorlist mirrorlist-backup instead of a cp mirrorlist mirrorlist-backup. I’m moderately sure it wasn’t me, because I normally name files foo.backup and not foo-backup. But I have no clue what this something was, although I suspect cachyos-rate-mirrors.