2019-10-16 - Christian Hesse

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 if you have not.