I released pacman-4.2 on the 19th of December – which is only marginally after the end of August as originally planned… We had 52 contributors provide patches to this release. Andrew takes the prize for most commits. Here are the top 10:

$ git shortlog -a -s -n v4.1.0..v4.2.0

164 Andrew Gregory

139 Allan McRae

66 Dave Reisner

26 Jason St. John

20 Florian Pritz

18 Pierre Neidhardt

15 Olivier Brunel

9 Jeremy Heiner

9 Jonathan Frazier

8 Dan McGee



The real prize goes to the person who caused the first reported bug. That could have been Dave but he caught it just in time. And I mean just! I posted to IRC “any ideas for the tag message” and the response I got was “I think I broke updpkgsums “. The shame of being first is inversely proportional to your commit count. (The small typos discovered so far do not count…)

Packaging Changes

There has been a couple of useful features added to makepkg . The main ones are:

Architecture Specific Fields: The source and depends (and related fields) now can all specify architecture specific values. For example:

source=("http://example.com/foo-$pkgver.tar.gz")

source_i686+=("http://example.com/bar32-$pkgver.tar.gz")

source_x86_64+=("http://example.com/bar64-$pkgver.tar.gz")

The source for a given architecture is used in addition to the global source. The ‘ += ‘ when specifying extra sources for an architecture does nothing different than just using ‘ = ‘, but I use it to serve as a reminder that these are additional values. Thanks to Dave!

Templating PKGBUILDs: Many PKGBUILDs share a similar build system, making them highly redundant. This is an attempt to reduce the redundancy by providing a template system. The easiest way to describe this is using an example, so I will use a potential perl module template. We create a file /usr/share/makepkg-template/perl-module-1.0.template . In this file is the build() , check() and package() functions and any common biolerplate. As this is our current version, it is also symlinked to perl-module.template . In our PKGBUILD, we would add:

# template input; name=perl-module;

and run makepkg-template . Now look in the PKGBUILD and you will see that line is replaced with:

# template start; name=perl-module; version=1.0;

build() {

...

# template end;

If we ever need to update the template, we create perl-module-2.0.template and update the symlink. Now run makepkg-template -n to update the PKGBUILD. Read “ man makepkg-template ” for more details. Thanks to Florian!

Incremental VCS Builds: Previously makepkg would remove its working copy of the VCS source directory before starting a new build. Now makepkg will just update the source copy (or attempt to in the case of SVN…) and build the package. This brings VCS builds in line with those using non-VCS sources. A new option -C/--clean was added to makepkg to remove the old $srcdir before building for cases where incremental builds fail. Thanks to Lukáš (and sorry it took me so long to deal with your patches)!

Source Package Information: To avoid things like the AUR attempting to parse bash to display information from a source tarball, we now provide a .SRCINFO file in an easily parseable format. Thanks to Dave!

Package Functions are Mandatory : The use of package() functions in PKGBUILD was introduced a long time ago. Now it is mandatory that a PKGBUILD has one (with the exception being metapackages that do not have a build() function either). Now that fakeroot usage is limited to the packaging step, the use of fakeroot is mandatory and building as root is disabled.

Misc. Changes: Other things of interest:

Static libraries are only removed with options=('!static') if they have a shared counterpart

if they have a shared counterpart Source signatures are required to be from a trusted source or listed in the validpgpkeys array. We also support kernel.org style source signing

array. We also support kernel.org style source signing Split packages can no longer override pkgver / pkgrel / epoch as that was a silly idea…

Pacman Changes

No we don’t have hooks… They are strongly planned for the next release.

Directory Symlink Handling: Example time! Arch Linux has a /lib -> /usr/lib symlink. Previously, if pacman was installing a package and it found files in /lib , it would follow the symlink and install it in /usr/lib . However the filelist for that package still recorded the file in /lib . This caused heaps of difficulty in conflict resolving – primarily the need to resolve every path of all package files to look for conflicts. That was a stupid idea! So now if pacman sees a /lib directory in a package, it will detect a conflict with the symlink on the filesystem. If you were using this feature to install files elsewhere, you probably need to look into what a bind mount is! Note that this change requires us to correct the local package file list for any package installed using this mis-feature, so we bumped the database version. Upgrade using pacman-db-upgrade . Thanks to Andrew!

Added an –assume-installed Option: I believe this options was invented during a perl update. Almost all compiled perl modules have a dependency on a specific perl version. So with a major perl update, all the modules need to be updated at the same time, or you can use -d to ignore dependency versions, but for all packages and not just perl. This is not a problem with the Arch repositories where all packages are updated at the same time, but if you have lots of perl modules from the AUR, you will need to remove those, update, then rebuild them. Instead you can use --assume-installed perl-5.18 and all those packages depending on perl=5.18 will not complain. Thanks to Florian!

Repository Usage Configuration: A new configuration keyword was added for repositories – Usage . It can take values Sync , Search , Install , Upgrade , All . For example, I have the [staging] and [multilb-testing] repositories in my pacman.conf with the Sync usage. That way I can look at what is in these repositories without using them for package updates. Thanks to Dave!

Mics. Changes: Other changes to pacman:

Improved dependency ordering – the dependency ordering did not go deep enough into the tree to ensure correct installation order.

A warning is printed if a directory on the filesystem has different permissions to the one being “installed” from the package.

Lock files should now never be left behind…

Various speed-ups, memory leak plugs and bug fixes

See here for a more complete list of changes.