Arch Linux in May 2024 #

Staff #

We would like to welcome Bert Peters (bertptrs) as well as Giovanni Harting (anonfunc) as part of the Arch Linux Package Maintainer team.

RFC #

An RFC has been accepted to introduce “Arch Linux Ports” as testbed for unofficial architectures until they are integrated in the main Arch Linux repositories.

devtools #

We have released devtools v1.2.0, featuring several new enhancements and improvements. This release includes distro flag changes, notably the addition of no-omit-frame-pointer flags and _FORTIFY_SOURCE level 3.

A new pkgctl version setup command has been implemented to automatically detect and configure nvchecker. We also added pkgctl repo clean which allows for the removal of untracked files. arch-nspawn now supports Pacman CacheServer, and offload building fetches logs from the remote server, making debugging easier for packagers. Additionally, pkgctl release now ensures split package uploads are released as a single batch, fixing a race condition when releasing in parallel.

mkinitcpio #

We have released mkinitcpio v39, featuring various improvements and fixes. The use of global variables for retrieving cmdline parameters is now deprecated, and hook authors should update their hooks to use the getarg function. This release also adds support for ARM zImage and introduces a new acpi_override hook for ACPI table upgrades and overrides. Additionally, lsinitcpio now supports listing, analyzing, and extracting UKIs.

AurWeb #

We have released AurWeb v6.2.10, which includes several improvements such as adding a maximum limit for comment length. Additionally, all application dependencies have been updated, and leftover mentions of [community] have been replaced with [extra].

ArchISO #

We have released ArchISO v78, which includes several improvements and bug fixes. Notable changes include fixing the check for microcode update files in initramfs images and formatting the EFI system partition as FAT32 with a reduced size of 36 MiB, down from 512 MiB.

Infrastructure #

We have added GitLab packages for pacman at pacman.archlinux.page, which now serves as the new homepage for our package manager.

ArchWeb #

We have released ArchWeb 2024-05-02, featuring minor HTML fixes and an updated bootstrap tarball extension to align with ArchISO v77’s switch from gzip to zstd compression. Additionally, this release includes compatibility dependency updates for Python 3.12.

Gluebuddy #

Gluebuddy v0.6.2, our infrastructure automation tool, now allows external contributors to remain part of our GitLab group without being automatically offboarded.

Packaging #

Statistics #

In this month, we’ve successfully rolled out 5383 package updates addressing various enhancements and rebuilds, including 2604 package upgrades. Additionally, we’ve received 285 new package issues, while resolving a total of 323 issues.