Some mirrors not carrying .dotfiles
Compare if you will
http://mirror.yandex.ru/mirrors/alpine/
and
http://dl-5.alpinelinux.org/alpine/
a few files are missing, notably the .latest.arch.txt, which helps find the latest version to install into a container for example
A pain when http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/cgi-bin/dl.cgi sends you to a broken mirror
Could be rsync not configured to exclude dotfiles or the webserver hiding dotfiles
(from redmine: issue id 3056, created on 2014-06-18, closed on 2015-02-14)