Parabola GNU/Linux-libre

Our rsync package was shipped with bundled zlib to provide compatibility with the old-style --compress option up to version 3.1.0. Version 3.1.1 was released on 2014-06-22 and is shipped by all major distributions now.

So we decided to finally drop the bundled library and ship a package with system zlib. This also fixes security issues, actual ones and in future. Go and blame those running old versions if you encounter errors with rsync 3.1.3-3.

As announced on the Arch-dev mailing list, on Friday, Dec 27 2019, the package compression scheme has changed from xz (.pkg.tar.xz) to zstd (.pkg.tar.zst).

zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with their options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of their packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.

We already have hundreds of zstd-compressed packages in our repositories, and as packages get updated more will keep rolling in. No user-facing issues have been found as of yet ...

due to some recent changes in arch, manual intervention may be required if you hit any errors of the form:

:: installing xorgproto (2019.2-2) breaks dependency * required by *

to correct dependency errors related to 'xorgproto':

# pacman -Qi libdmx      &>1 && pacman -Rdd libdmx
# pacman -Qi libxxf86dga &>1 && pacman -Rdd libxxf86dga
# pacman -Syu

The compression algorithm zstd brings faster compression and decompression, while maintaining a compression ratio comparable with xz. This will speed up package installation with pacman, without further drawbacks.

The imminent release of pacman 5.2 brings build tools with support for compressing packages with zstd. To install these packages you need libarchive with support for zstd, which entered the repositories in September 2018. In order for zstd compressed packages to be distributed, we require all users to have updated to at least libarchive 3.3.3-1. You have had a year, so we expect you already did update. Hurry up ...

The base group has been replaced by a metapackage of the same name. We advise users to install this package (pacman -Syu base), as it is effectively mandatory from now on.

Users requesting support are expected to be running a system with the base package.

Addendum: Be aware that base as it stands does not currently contain:

• A kernel

• An editor

... and other software that you might expect. You will have to install these separately on new installations.