Arch Linux in November 2023 #

Arch Summit 2023 #

The Arch Summit took place in Hamburg, Germany, on November 4th and 5th, bringing together Arch Linux staff and invited guests. The summit provided an opportunity for the staff to connect, socialize, and delve into discussions regarding various aspects of our distro.

A range of topics were explored including but not limited to infrastructure and mirror management, rebuilders for packages, signing enclave, mkinitcpio, packaging tooling improvements, and community building. Reports on these discussions will be published later.

A special thanks to “adesso SE” for generously sponsoring the event, offering an excellent venue and catering support.

Bug migration #

We are happy to announce that the migration from Flyspray to GitLab is complete. 🥳 Bug reports and Merge Requests for packages or Arch Linux projects can now be found on GitLab. For more details, check out the related Arch Linux news post.

Testing Team #

To join the Arch Testing Team, simply drop an email to arch-testing-accounts@archlinux.org. This transitions the process to a team-based approach that not only speeds up the account setup process but also provides a more collaborative environment through the GitLab service desk.

If you’re keen on diving into contributing to Arch Linux, joining the Arch Testing Team is a fantastic way to kickstart your involvement. 🚀

bugbuddy #

Bugbuddy v0.2.0 has undergone significant updates, including the periodic refresh of maintainer and staff data from ArchWeb, ensuring the automatic reflection of package orphaning and adoption. Additionally, package maintainers can now opt-in to be assigned to unconfirmed issues for their packages.

Furthermore, default labels for severity and priority have been added, and merge requests have been streamlined with automatic assignment to package maintainers.

mkinitcpio #

mkinitcpio v37 has been released. Notable changes include the consolefont hook now using the kbd project’s setfont, resolving past issues. Furthermore, the autodetect hook introduced a workaround for a race condition with udevadm settle and includes all possibly needed modules as an alternative fallback, preventing incomplete initramfs images and potential unbootable systems.

Check out the mkinitcpio v37 release announcement for more details and additional changes.

dbscripts #

Recent updates enhance atomicity by consolidating a unit of work and implementing robust error handling. Concurrency issues have been resolved by replacing outdated locking code with a modern, convenient API, and adopting less error-prone locking through flock. These changes collectively address various scenarios that previously resulted in inconsistencies between operations and had the potential to corrupt the repository state.

alpm-types #

alpm-types has been released in version 0.4.0 introducing various smaller fixes and improvements. More information can be found in the changelog.

Pacman #

Pacman is in the final stages of preparing its next major release, version 7.0.0.

Additionally, collaborative efforts with an external auditor for the audit of the package manager and libalpm have been initiated. Stay tuned for more information and announcements around this exciting development in the near future.