Arch monthly May

Pacman release

Finally! A new pacman release, this version adds some critical bits for reproducible builds and the pacman repository has been shed of misc tools which are now in pacman-contrib. More details in the changelog and on reddit

BUILDINFO Rebuild

For reproducible builds, every package in the repository build on a users system should create exactly the same package as the repository package. To be able to achieve this the packages which where installed in build chroot are recorded in a BUILDINFO file (man BUILDINFO) which is added in the .pkg.tar.xz package. BUILDINFO files where added a while ago in pacman, but not every package contains them yet! Interestingly enough even a rolling release distro contains packages from 2013, these are now being rebuild! This also ties in to the cleanup of archive.archlinux.org, since the archive server is almost full and the 2013/2014/2015 directories will be removed. If you have a good network connection and want to mirror the archive, reach out!

pkgconf replaces pkg-config

As can be read on the mailing list, pkgconf has now replaced pkg-config.

GCC 8 in [core]

The latest version of GCC 8 lands in [core], this enables more warnings by default so older packages might fail to build if they enable -Werror.