Arch Linux in February 2024 #

Staff #

We would like to welcome Vincent Dahmen (wahrwolf) as Arch Linux Support Staff with their new role as Mirror Admin.

On top we would like to welcome andreymal and codingkoopa to their new role as ArchWiki Maintainers.

Additionally, we would like to congratulate Christian Heusel (gromit) on his promotion to a full DevOps member.

Testing Team #

In early February, we issued a call for participation about joining the Arch Testing Team which was also shared on the Forum, Mastodon, Reddit and IRC. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with over 60 new testing accounts created, significantly extending our capacity for more reliable package update testing! For those who haven’t joined yet, there’s still time! 😉

ArchISO #

For the first time in history, the official Arch ISO does not fit in a CD as it now exceeds even the largest 900 MiB capacity CDs. Those few still using the coaster form factor instead of USB flash drives will need to switch to a DVD for burning the ISO.

devtools #

We released devtools 1.1.0, a major update packed with bug fixes, improvements, and new workflow commands. Notable additions include the pkgctl version subcommand, which uses nvchecker to check and apply newer upstream versions, the pkgctl search subcommand to search expressions across the entire packaging group, and the pkgctl aur subcommand to assist in transitioning packages from official repos to the AUR.

Additionally, makechrootpkg now allows users to drop into a debug shell for inspecting failed builds within the chroot. All packaging repo clones also come with a default excludes file to ignore common artifacts. Further changes are listed in the changelog.

mkinitcpio #

The latest mkinitcpio release v38 introduces key changes, including the deprecation of --microcode option in favor of a new microcode hook for early microcode loading. mkinitcpio now supports creating an early CPIO image, with the microcode hook handling the integration of early microcode into this image.

ArchWiki #

To enhance readability, the color of visited links has been updated from gray to the MediaWiki default purple.

In addition to welcoming CodingKoopa and Andreymal to their new roles as ArchWiki Maintainers, we are also excited to welcome Dybdeskarphet, who joins as a new Translator.

RFC #

An RFC has been accepted to add -fno-omit-frame-pointer and -mno-omit-leaf-frame-pointer to the default compilation flags to improve the effectiveness of profiling and debugging tools.

Packaging #

ghc #

We have successfully rolled out GHC 9.2 after resolving all outstanding issues, marking another step toward the latest GHC.

Plasma 6 #

Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Applications 24.02 (mostly ported to Qt6) are now available in the repositories.

Statistics #

In this month, we’ve successfully rolled out 8196 package updates addressing various enhancements and rebuilds, including 2612 package upgrades. Additionally, we’ve received 168 new package issues, while resolving a total of 216 issues.