wonder's Arch Linux Blog

Hey,
I keep seeing a lot of discussions about how “arch tends to fuck itself” from time to time. I’m trying to summarize and give a few simple advices about this “issue”.

I’m starting with explaining first why is breaking. It does it because our users have full control over their systems and they customize it in any possible and impossible ways.

I’m a developer and a contributor in Arch Linux for about 3 years and an arch user for about 6 years now and I noticed that the number one reason for “arghh updates screwed up my system”, is replacing important stock packages with unsupported ones. With unsupported, I mean, mostly builds from AUR, but it can include 3rd party repositories that cannot keep up with us. (yes, i’m looking at you archlinuxfr )

So what can you do to increase your system stability?

1. Always read the news entries, subscribe to the rss feed, arch-announce mailing list
2. Know your system more. If I’m replacing a stock package, I know that I have to take care of it if a news entry specifies something.
3. Don’t use 3rd party repos and always install packages from AUR using makepkg manually. This allows you to know your system better and yaourt and other scripts that “helps” you, in fact does a lot of disservice.
4. Always do pacman -Syu and never use -f along with it.

We used to have this section when we had a newsletter every month. Starting today, i’m going to announce modifications in our development team.

Recently five new TUs were joining us!

• Brad Fanella (itsbrad212) from the US, sponsored by Chris Brannon
• Florian Pritz (bluewind), from Austria, sponsored by Thorsten Töpper
• Lukáš Jirkovský (stativ), from Czech Republic, sponsored by Thomas Dziedzic
• Jonathan Conder (PirateJonno), from New Zealand, sponsored by Ionuț Bîru
• Jakob Gruber (schuay), from Austria, sponsored by Laurent Carlier

We give you a warm welcome and wish you to have fun in our team.

I guess everybody now knows that we have a new repository called multilib.  What does that have?

A multilib toolchain that supports both the 32bit (x86) and 64bit (x86_64) formats. This was the only requirement that we missed until now.

pacman -S virtualbox-ose

P.S for all users that are using  my unofficial vbox repo, i suggest to remove it from your pacman.conf because i would shutdown it in the next days.

I must say that i like this kind of actions where the community is interacting with developers and trusted users. It reminds me how awesome are our users.

So what happens in a bug day? We join #archlinux-bugs@Freenode and we work together on bugs submitted on our tracker, trying to see if is still valid, writing builds, searching patches and building packages.

Thanks to td123 (he’s our new TU member) who requested to do this action and doing a lot of work in community project, angvp (our new dev member) who did his first contributions in the main repository, Bluewind for directing and building packages along with us, keenerd making a bot that announce all kind of actions about bugs(opening, closing, edit) and everybody else who participated.

We ended up with something like this:

Hi guys,

i just made another video with commits from a whole year and it looks awesome. I’ve used a forked code swarm which had a lot of improvements compared with the original project.

Tools that i used to make this video:

• code swarm: http://github.com/wonder/code_swarm contains the forked code swarm + the configuration to generate this video (arch.config)
• kdenlive: even that i exclusively use gnome and I’m a big fan of gnome, kdenlive really rulz
• the music was chosen by macrobat from #archlinux channel. He was very inspired to chose this particular soundtrack. It fits perfectly. Many thanks again.

Is really nice to see how a project grows every day and how much time we invest in making arch was it is right now.

Enjoy

Video is located here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj8SUZUoZzU

Hi,

I’m going to remove this package from community and move it to aur because Facebook now has support for XMPP, along with it also is moved json-glib.

Severals links that you may be interested:

• http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pidgin#Facebook_XMPP
• http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=297991732130