This Friday morning (2023-05-19) the Git packaging migration will start until Sunday (2023-05-21). The Arch Linux packaging team will not be able to update packages in any of the repositories during this period.

Notification when the migration starts, and when it is completed, will be published on the [arch-dev-public] mailing list.

How does this impact Arch Linux users?

The [testing] repository will be split into [core-testing] and [extra-testing] , the [staging] repository will be split into [core-staging] and [extra-staging] . The [community] repository will be merged into [extra] and will therefore be empty after the migration.

All affected repositories will be provided as empty repositories for a transition period after the migration. For regular users, this means that everything works as before.

Note: After the migration is done, users that have the testing repositories enabled need to include the new repositories ( [core-testing] and [extra-testing] instead of [testing] ) in their pacman.conf before updating their system.

Other changes:

• SVN access is discontinued and will dissappear.
• The svn2git mirror will no longer be updated.
• asp , which relies on the svn2git mirror, will stop working. It is replaced by pkgctl repo clone .

How does this impact Arch Linux tier 1 mirrors?

During the migration rsync and HTTP access will be shut down. We will send an email notification to arch-mirrors once everything has been finished.

How does this impact Arch Linux packagers?

Packagers will not be able to patch and update their packages. The internal Tier 0 mirror is also going to be disabled for the duration of this migration.

The base-devel package group has recently been replaced by a meta package of the same name.
People that had the base-devel package group installed (meaning people that installed base-devel before February 2nd) have to explicitly re-install it to get the new base-devel package installed on their system:

pacman -Syu base-devel

The php packages have been updated to the latest version 8.2. Inaddition to this, a new set of php-legacy packages have beenintroduced. These will follow the oldest but still actively supportedPHP branch. This enables users to install the latest version but alsointroduces the option to use third party applications that might relyon an older version. Both branches will be kept up to date followingour rolling release model. php and php-legacy can be installed at thesame time as the latter uses a -legacy suffix for its binaries andconfiguration files.

In addition to this, the php7 packages have been removed as theyreached end of life. The imap extension will no longer be provided asit relies on the c-client library which has been abandoned for manyyears.

Arch Linux mourns the sudden loss of Jonathon Fernyhough, known in our community as jonathon , who passed away on Saturday night.

Jonathon was an active participant and contributor to Arch Linux, several derived distributions, the AUR and through personal repositories. He was enthusiastic, helpful and eager to contribute towards improving the free and open source software community as a whole.

On behalf of the wider Arch Linux community, our condolences go out to his family and friends.

Python 2 went end of life January 2020. Since then we have been actively cutting down the number of projects depending on python2 in our repositories, and we have finally been able to drop it from our distribution. If you still have python2 installed on your system consider removing it and any python2 package.

If you still require the python2 package you can keep it around, but please be aware that there will be no security updates. If you need a patched package please consult the AUR, or use an unofficial user repository .

As part of dropping Python 2 which is EOL, we have migrated our mailing lists from mailman2 to mailman3.

Rewriting of the "From" header and subject (to prepend the list name) have been disabled to keep the DKIM signature intact. This means " reply to mailing list " must be used when replying to the list and you may need to update your filters and rules matching the "From" header.

All existing subscriptions are migrated and you do not need to re-subscribe. For managing your subscriptions a new mailman3 account must be registered .

Recent changes in grub added a new command option to fwsetup and changed theway the command is invoked in the generated boot configuration. Depending onyour system hardware and setup this could cause an unbootable system due toincompatibilities between the installed bootloader and configuration. After a grub package update it is advised to run both, installation and regenerationof configuration:

grub-install ...grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

For more specific information on grub-install , please refer to the wiki: GRUB - ArchWiki

wxWidgets 3.2 provides a Qt frontend in addition to the GTK3 one, so packages have been renamed from wxgtk- to wxwidgets- .The GTK2 frontend is no longer provided. If you have wxgtk2 installed, the upgrade will fail with

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies):: removing wxgtk-common breaks dependency 'wxgtk-common' required by wxgtk2

In such case, uninstall wxgtk2 first and then proceed with the upgrade.

Two days ago the wireplumber package was made to replace pipewire-media-session as the latter session manager for PipeWire is considered dead upstream and will see no more releases. Unfortunately, this step was premature.

Our pipewire audio packages ( pipewire-alsa , pipewire-jack and pipewire-pulse ) ship configuration that prompt media-session to activate PipeWire's audio features. When these packages are not installed and the configuration is missing, PipeWire can be used for screen recording without interfering with ALSA or PulseAudio.

WirePlumber disregards this mechanism and always configures PipeWire to grab audio devices, meaning users of PulseAudio or bare ALSA experience broken audio.

The replacement has been reverted while we attempt to look for a better solution switching to WirePlumber. If you are currently not using PipeWire for audio and wireplumber got installed on your system, please reinstall pipewire-media-session and reboot to restore audio functionality.

pacman -Syu pipewire-media-session