Recently we held our leader election, and the previous Project Leader Levente "anthraxx" Polyák ran again while no other people were nominated for the role. As per our election rules he is re-elected for a new term. The role of of the project lead within Arch Linux is connected to a few responsibilities regarding decision making (when no consensus can be reached), handling financial matters with SPI and overall project management tasks. Congratulations to Levente and all the best wishes for another successful term ..read more

The vm.max_map_count paramater will be increased from the default 65530 value to 1048576. This change should help address performance, crash or start-up issues for a number of memory intensive applications, particularly for (but not limited to) some Windows games played through Wine/Steam Proton. Overall, end users should have a smoother experience out of the box with no expressed concerns about potential downsides in the related proposal on arch-dev-public mailing list. This vm.max_map_count increase is introduced in the 2024.04.07-1 release of the filesystem package and will be effective rig ..read more

With the release of mkinitcpio v38, several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have been moved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt, sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev. To ensure no breakage of users' setup occurs, temporary conflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packages that are no longer compatible. The following packages needs to be upgraded together: mkinitcpio 38-3 systemd 255.4-2 lvm2 2.03.23-3 mdadm 4.3-2 cryptsetup 2.7.0-3 Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode, and the microcode option in ..read more

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, for improved performance, reliability and integration with systemd. For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon, the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units. We recommend picking the default. For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25 ..read more

We are happy to announce that the migration of the bugtracker to GitLab is done! ? Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration! This means the issue tracker and merge requests on the GitLab package repos are now enabled. The old bugtracker will subsequently be closed down. For archiving reasons there will be a static copy so that links (for example the randomly picked Task #56716) are still stable, migrated bugs have a closing comment pointing to the new URL on GitLab. Packaging bugs are now opened on the repo hosting the corresponding packaging sources, the "Add a new Bug" button o ..read more

We are introducing a change in JDK/JRE packages of our distro. This is triggered from the way a JRE is build in modern versions of Java (>9). We are introducing this change in Java 21. To sum it up instead of having JDK and JRE packages coexist in the same system we will be making them conflict. The JDK variant package includes the runtime environment to execute Java applications so if one needs compilation and runtime of Java they need only the JDK package in the future. If, on the other hand, they need just runtime of Java then JRE (or jre-headless) will work. This will (potentially) requ ..read more

With shadow >= 4.14.0, Arch Linux's default password hashing algorithm changed from SHA512 to yescrypt [1]. Furthermore, the umask [2] settings are now configured in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile. This should not require any manual intervention. Reasons for Yescrypt The password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme yescrypt has been chosen due to its adoption (readily available in libxcrypt, which is used by pam [3]) and its stronger resilience towards password cracking attempts over SHA512. Although the winner of the Password Hashing Competition [4] has ..read more

As of ansible-core 2.15.3, upstream moved documentation and examples to a separate dedicated repository (see the related changelogs). This means that, starting from version 2.15.3 the ansible-core package will stop shipping documentation and a default configuration example under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg. Regarding the documentation, it is available online: https://docs.ansible.com/ As for the configuration file, as explained in the wiki, a base config can be generated with the following command: ansible-config init --disabled > ansible.cfg After updating from ansible-core <= 2.15.2-1 to ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more