Arch Linux in November 2021 #
Staff #
We are happy to welcome artafinde among the Trusted Users. Additionally Segaja has applied to become a Trusted User and the vote is currently in progress.
mkinitcpio #
A new mkinitcpio version v31 has been released. Besides various nice improvements the biggest highligh of this release is support for efi stub generation.
There is also a new wiki page for Unified kernel images.
Keyring #
The new keyringctl tooling has been finalized and merged. The next steps are to convert the keyring data using the new tooling to a curated source of truth.
Additionally we have started to replace packager keys that were not meeting our
latest strength requirements and to ensure that each key has a dedicated
@archlinux.org UID. The goal is that for packaging purpose we only sign
@archlinux.org UIDs with the main keys but still allow web-of-trust cross-sigs
issued from packager keys.
Devtools #
A new devtools version 20211129 has been released. The new devtools
package is waiting in [staging] for the python 3.10 rebuild to finish in order
to avoid additional hassle with an already cumbersome rebuild.
LTO has additionally been enabled is this release as the issues should be easy
to spot and extremely simple to work around by just setting an options knob
inside the PKGBUILD.
Once devtools has been moved out of [testing], a wide ranged rebuild is planned
to make use of the new flags on a broad scale.
Python #
The process to upgrade to Python 3.10 has started and we are currently rebuilding all Python packages.
Packagers are also actively working on removing Python 2 from the repositories. Packages used for development, like python2-virtualenv and python2-pip, was recently removed and there is work under way to clear out rest of the python2 packages.
archinstall #
A new archinstall version 2.3.0 has been released with a lot of new
functionality and improvements. Most notably it contains:
- GRUB and Disk Encryption now properly works and supports multiple encrypted volumes.
- BTRFS subvolumes (beta only supports a nested structure and has some known issues)
- A rudimentary plugin-support, allowing users to create their own plugins.
- swap has been added into the mix using zram and zram-generator.
Reproducible Builds #
A new rebuilderd version has been released that supports build groups, meaning it’s now possible to have one build reproduce multiple artifacts at once. This aids being able to check split packages more efficiently instead of building the whole group multiple times for every single split artifact.
archlinux-repro has also had a new release which fixed some bugs.