Arch Linux: Recent news updates

budgie-desktop >= 10.7.2-6 update requires manual intervention

Campbell Jones — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 14:55:16 +0000

When upgrading from budgie-desktop 10.7.2-5 to 10.7.2-6, the package mutter43 must be replaced with magpie-wm, which currently depends on mutter. As mutter43 conflicts with mutter, manual intervention is required to complete the upgrade.

First remove mutter43, then immediately perform the upgrade. Do not relog or reboot between these steps.

pacman -Rdd mutter43

pacman -Syu

TeX Live package reorganization

Antonio Rojas — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 09:14:37 +0000

Starting from version 2023.66594-9, TeX Live packages have been reorganized to mirror upstream collections. Even though the new texlive-basic replaces the old texlive-core, many of the texlive-core contents (including language specific files) are now split between different packages. To find out which Arch package contains a specific CTAN package, you can use the tlmgr utility, eg.

$ tlmgr info euler | grep collection
collection:  collection-latexrecommended

which means the euler CTAN package is contained in texlive-latexrecommended. You may also use pacman -F to query for specific files.

A new metapackage texlive-meta is available to install all subpackages (except for language specific ones), and the new texlive-doc package provides the full documentation for offline use.

OpenBLAS >= 0.3.23-2 update requires manual intervention

Felix Yan — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 20:27:28 +0000

The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn't ship optimized LAPACK routine and CBLAS/LAPACKE interfaces for compatibility. This decision has been reverted now, and the ability to choose a different default system BLAS/LAPACK implementation while keeping openblas installed is now provided to allow future co-installation of BLIS, ATLAS, etc.

The default BLAS implementation will be used for most packages like NumPy or R. Please install "blas-openblas" and "blas64-openblas" to make OpenBLAS the default BLAS implementation, just like the old behavior.

Unfortunately you will get errors on updating if you currently have OpenBLAS installed as the default BLAS implementation:

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) :: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by cblas :: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by lapack

Please append your preferred default BLAS implementation to the regular -Syu command line to get around it. For example:

pacman -Syu blas-openblas

pacman -Syu blas

Git migration completed

Levente Polyak — Sun, 21 May 2023 11:14:50 +0000

We are proud to announce that the migration to Git packaging succeeded! 🥳

Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration!

Package sources are now available on GitLab. Note that the bugtracker is still flyspray and that merge requests are not accepted as of now. We intend to open the issue tracker and merge requests on the Gitlab package repos in the near future.

Mirrors are syncing again, but it may take a bit of time until your mirror of choice has caught up.

For users

Update your system and merge the pacman pacnew /etc/pacman.conf.pacnew file. This is required as we have moved the [community] repository into [extra].

$ pacman -Syu "pacman>=6.0.2-7"

For users of the now deprecated asp tool, you will need to switch to pkgctl:

$ pacman -Syu "devtools>=1:1.0.0-1"
$ pkgctl repo clone linux

For some more detailed instructions on how to obtain PKGBUILDs see the corresponding wiki article.

For packagers

Before starting, first uninstall devtools-git-poc and remove any repos from your filesystem that you cloned during the git proof-of-concept testing.

Make sure you have both, an updated devtools and pacman on your system:

$ pacman -Syu "devtools>=1:1.0.0-1" "pacman>=6.0.2-7"

Additionally clean up old chroots in /var/lib/archbuild/

$ rm -rf /var/lib/archbuild/
# or optionally, use the --clean option for pkgctl build *ONCE*
$ pkgctl build --clean

For instruction on how to use pkgctl, please take a look at the "How to be a packager" wiki article and also consult the man page of each subcommand for further information:

$ man pkgctl-build
$ man pkgctl-repo-clone

Git migration announcement

Jelle van der Waa — Mon, 15 May 2023 19:50:21 +0000

This Friday morning (2023-05-19) the Git packaging migration will start until Sunday (2023-05-21). The Arch Linux packaging team will not be able to update packages in any of the repositories during this period.

Notification when the migration starts, and when it is completed, will be published on the [arch-dev-public] mailing list.

How does this impact Arch Linux users?

The [testing] repository will be split into [core-testing] and [extra-testing], the [staging] repository will be split into [core-staging] and [extra-staging]. The [community] repository will be merged into [extra] and will therefore be empty after the migration.

All affected repositories will be provided as empty repositories for a transition period after the migration. For regular users, this means that everything works as before.

Note: After the migration is done, users that have the testing repositories enabled need to include the new repositories ([core-testing] and [extra-testing] instead of [testing]) in their pacman.conf before updating their system.

Other changes:

SVN access is discontinued and will dissappear.
The svn2git mirror will no longer be updated.
asp, which relies on the svn2git mirror, will stop working. It is replaced by pkgctl repo clone.

How does this impact Arch Linux tier 1 mirrors?

During the migration rsync and HTTP access will be shut down. We will send an email notification to arch-mirrors once everything has been finished.

How does this impact Arch Linux packagers?

Packagers will not be able to patch and update their packages. The internal Tier 0 mirror is also going to be disabled for the duration of this migration.

Switch to the base-devel meta package requires manual intervention

Robin Candau — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 14:43:35 +0000

On February 2nd, the base-devel package group has been replaced by a meta package of the same name.
If you installed the base-devel package group prior to this date, explicitly re-install it to get the new base-devel package installed on the system:

pacman -Syu base-devel

PHP 8.2 update and introduction of legacy branch

Pierre Schmitz — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 14:46:04 +0000

The php packages have been updated to the latest version 8.2. In addition to this, a new set of php-legacy packages have been introduced. These will follow the oldest but still actively supported PHP branch. This enables users to install the latest version but also introduces the option to use third party applications that might rely on an older version. Both branches will be kept up to date following our rolling release model. php and php-legacy can be installed at the same time as the latter uses a -legacy suffix for its binaries and configuration files.

In addition to this, the php7 packages have been removed as they reached end of life. The imap extension will no longer be provided as it relies on the c-client library which has been abandoned for many years.

In memory of Jonathon Fernyhough

Morten Linderud — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 12:12:16 +0000

Arch Linux mourns the sudden loss of Jonathon Fernyhough, known in our community as jonathon, who passed away on Saturday night.

Jonathon was an active participant and contributor to Arch Linux, several derived distributions, the AUR and through personal repositories. He was enthusiastic, helpful and eager to contribute towards improving the free and open source software community as a whole.

On behalf of the wider Arch Linux community, our condolences go out to his family and friends.

Removing python2 from the repositories

Jelle van der Waa — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:42:36 +0000

Python 2 went end of life January 2020. Since then we have been actively cutting down the number of projects depending on python2 in our repositories, and we have finally been able to drop it from our distribution. If you still have python2 installed on your system consider removing it and any python2 package.

If you still require the python2 package you can keep it around, but please be aware that there will be no security updates. If you need a patched package please consult the AUR, or use an unofficial user repository.

Arch Linux mailing list changes

Kristian Klausen — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 13:11:30 +0000

As part of dropping Python 2 which is EOL, we have migrated our mailing lists from mailman2 to mailman3.

Rewriting of the "From" header and subject (to prepend the list name) have been disabled to keep the DKIM signature intact. This means "reply to mailing list" must be used when replying to the list and you may need to update your filters and rules matching the "From" header.

All existing subscriptions are migrated and you do not need to re-subscribe. For managing your subscriptions a new mailman3 account must be registered.