Arch Linux in March 2023 #
Git packaging sources #
We have improved a lot of pieces in pkgctl according to the feedback from the
sandbox environment. Most notably it is possible to provide GitLab tokens via
the DEVTOOLS_GITLAB_TOKEN environment variable, pass nocheck to the build
command for bootstrap builds, handle subrelease pkgrels as well as several
bugfixes.
We are doing another round of testing and would like to proceed with the rollout afterwards.
devtools #
A new version 20230307 has been released adding support for
architecture-specific mount config. Furthermore sogrep now uses the first
mirror that is configured for each repo in pacman.conf with a fallback to
https://geo.mirror.pkgbuild.com. Additionally we added checks to not allow
package releases of PKGBUILD sources with only weak cryptographic hashing
algorithms.
namcap #
A new version 3.4.0 has been released with a huge amount of cleanup and codebase improvements. Furthermore new checks have been added like optdepends and sodepends as well as improved pydepends.
archiso #
Starting with archlinux-2023.03.01-x86_64.iso, the official ISO supports what
is called file system transposition (only on UEFI).
This means the ISO can be simply extracted (using an archiver or by mounting and copying) to the root of a FAT formatted partition and it will workâ˘. Messing with boot loader configuration files is not required anymore.
The ArchISO and Arch Wiki documentations have been updated with the new simplified instructions.
mkinitcpio #
mkinitcpio version 35 followed by bugfix releases 35.1 and 35.2 are out!
A major new feature is support for post-generation hooks a.k.a post hooks. These hooks get run after the initramfs generation and can be used to sign the generated images for Secure Boot. Examples are provided here and here.
Thanks to improvements in xz reproducibility, mkinitcpio can now use multi-threaded xz compression.