Arch Linux in May 2020 #
Staff #
TU addition #
We are happy to welcome Frederik aka freswa among the Trusted Users. Some of you may already know him as one of our bug wranglers where he joined forces in February 2020.
Packaging #
Go #
The Go package guidelines have been overhauled and in conjunction the go-pie package has been removed. The major difference is a new set of CGO/GOFLAGS that ensure all our distro flags are respected appropriately, leading to Go binaries with RELRO, PIE and fortify hardening. A to-do list to reflect these changes is pending.
CMake #
The CMake package guidelines have been created which describe some important bits to consider when packaging software using cmake. Most notably appropriate release type option that may otherwise have undesired effects, removal of non required RPATH usage as well as some convenience options to build in subdirectories without manually creating them. As CMake still does not respect CPPFLAGS itself, which results in fortify hardening being ignored, a temporary patch has been added to circumvent this misbehavior, a to-do list to reflect these changes is pending.
Reproducible builds #
You may have noticed a couple of large rebuilds that occurred recently. These
fixed issues of non-reproducible file ordering with old versions of makepkg.
This and other hard work by the team improving our tooling and fixing packaging
issues has resulted in 96% of [core] being reproducible, and 90% of [extra].
You can see the status of which packages are reproducible. A full progress
report can be found on the corresponding thread on arch-dev-public.
We have set up a fleet of three rebuilderd runners to continuously test our distributed repository packages and populate our status page. Some integration into archweb to indicate the current reproducibility status is planned.
Infrastructure #
GitLab #
We’re in the process of switching our Git hosting from our custom cgit instance to GitLab! We created gitlab.archlinux.org and have started moving some projects. We’ll continue moving projects onto GitLab and will then get rid of our cgit instance.
Users can currently not collaborate with us on GitLab as we still need to get some monitoring in place to make sure we can keep a close eye on usages to ward off abuse. However, we’re planning on doing this soon and then we’ll open up GitLab to everyone. Finally you can collaborate on Arch like it’s 2020!
We’re also going to use GitLab for other things such as bug tracker (instead of Flyspray), Kanban board (instead of Kanboard), and service desk (for GDPR requests and such).
Single-sign-on/Keycloak #
Arch operates many different services - all of which with their own login systems and account databases. This is not ideal from a security and convenience standpoint. We’d like to enforce the same security requirements for all users while also allowing everyone to use the same account to log in to all of our services. It’ll also finally allow you to use 2-factor authentication for all Arch services.
We still have a long way to go here in terms of integrating all services via SAML/OIDC and figuring out how to let users continue using their old accounts.
SVN to Git migration #
The git migration plans have been picked up again, and started working towards
a proof-of-concept implementation. This would allow packagers to avoid the
SVN mono repository and manage each package as a separate git repository, and
facilitate some modernization of our current tooling. More information about
the plans and implementation will hit the [arch-dev-public] list in the
upcoming week.
Projects #
Archiso #
The archiso project has been moved to Arch Linux’ GitLab instance. Furthermore over the past weeks smaller and larger fixes found their way into the repository. In the future all merge requests and releases will be handled via GitLab. CI integration and more elaborate test suites are still being developed to ensure a more robust setup for our monthly release images and any custom use cases.
Pacman #
Initial support for parallel downloads landed in the pacman code base, requiring large changes to the codebase. Many patches providing the finishing to this feature have been submitted. Once the code churn around this feature request has slowed, we will make a beta release for wider testing. Additionally, one obscure area of non-reproducility in packages was discovered through the Arch Linux reproducible builds effort, and subsequently fixed in makepkg. Furthermore, the move from using autotools to meson for the pacman build system was completed. Discussion is ongoing on moving the pacman codebase to the Arch Linux GitLab instance, with initial CI setup being added to the codebase.
SPI #
For the upcoming SPI annual report 2019, a section about some of Arch Linux achievements has been assembled to represent our project. A link to the report will be distributed once it’s available.