With the release of mkinitcpio v38 , several hooks previously provided by Arch packages have beenmoved to the mkinitcpio upstream project. The hooks are: systemd, udev, encrypt,sd-encrypt, lvm2 and mdadm_udev.

To ensure no breakage of users' setup occurs, temporaryconflicts have been introduced into the respective packages to prevent installing packagesthat are no longer compatible.

The following packages needs to be upgraded together:

• mkinitcpio 38-2
• systemd 255.4-2
• lvm2 2.03.23-3
• mdadm 4.3-2
• cryptsetup 2.7.0-3

Please note that the mkinitcpio flag --microcode , and the microcode option in the preset files, has been deprecated in favour ofa new microcode hook. This also allows you to drop the microcode initrd lines from your boot configuration as they are now packed together with the main initramfs image.

We are making dbus-broker our default implementation of D-Bus, forimproved performance, reliability and integration with systemd.

For the foreseeable future we will still support the use of dbus-daemon ,the previous implementation. Pacman will ask you whether to install dbus-broker-units or dbus-daemon-units . We recommend picking thedefault.

For a more detailed rationale, please see our RFC 25 .

We are happy to announce that the migration of the bugtracker to GitLab is done! 🥳

Thanks to everyone who has helped during the migration!

This means the issue tracker and merge requests on the GitLab package repos are now enabled.

The old bugtracker will subsequently be closed down. For archiving reasons there will be a static copy so that links (for example the randomly picked Task #56716 ) are still stable, migrated bugs have a closing comment pointing to the new URL on GitLab.

Packaging bugs are now opened on the repo hosting the corresponding packaging sources, the "Add a new Bug" button on the package page on archlinux.org will automatically direct you to the correct place to open the issue. The workflow afterwards is mostly the same, first our Bug Wranglers will have a look at the issues and triage them, and then they will be handed over to the respective Package Maintainers to fix. A list of all issues can be found here .

If you do not have an account for GitLab already (which authenticates against our SSO service ), please write us a mail with your desired username to accountsupport@archlinux.org as advised in the banner.

We are introducing a change in JDK/JRE packages of our distro. This istriggered from the way a JRE is build in modern versions of Java (>9). We areintroducing this change in Java 21.

To sum it up instead of having JDK and JRE packages coexist in the same systemwe will be making them conflict. The JDK variant package includes the runtimeenvironment to execute Java applications so if one needs compilation andruntime of Java they need only the JDK package in the future. If, on the otherhand, they need just runtime of Java then JRE (or jre-headless) will work.

This will (potentially) require a manual user action during upgrade:

• if you have both JDK and JRE installed you can manually install the JDKwith pacman -Sy jdk-openjdk and this removes the JRE related packages.
• if you have both JRE and JRE-headless you will need to choose one ofthem and install it manually since they would conflict each other now.
• If you only have one of the JDK/JRE/JRE-headless pacman should resolvedependencies normally and no action is needed.

At the moment this is only valid for the upcoming JDK 21 release.

With shadow >= 4.14.0 , Arch Linux's default password hashing algorithm changed from SHA512 to yescrypt [1].

Furthermore, the umask [2] settings are now configured in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile .

This should not require any manual intervention.

Reasons for Yescrypt

The password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme yescrypt has been chosen due to its adoption (readily available in libxcrypt , which is used by pam [3]) and its stronger resilience towards password cracking attempts over SHA512 .

Although the winner of the Password Hashing Competition [4] has been argon2 , this even more resilient algorithm is not yet available in libxcrypt [5][6].

Configuring yescrypt

The YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR setting in /etc/login.defs is currently without effect, until pam implements reading its value [7]. If a YESCRYPT_COST_FACTOR higher (or lower) than the default ( 5 ) is needed, it can be set using the rounds option of the pam_unix [8] module (i.e. in /etc/pam.d/system-auth ).

General list of changes

• yescrypt is used as default password hashing algorithm, instead of SHA512
• pam honors the chosen ENCRYPT_METHOD in /etc/login.defs and does not override the chosen method anymore
• changes in the filesystem (>= 2023.09.18 ) and pambase (>= 20230918 ) packages ensure, that umask is set centrally in /etc/login.defs instead of /etc/profile

[1] https://www.openwall.com/yescrypt/

[2] https://man.archlinux.org/man/umask.1p

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PAM

[4] https://www.password-hashing.net/

[5] https://github.com/besser82/libxcrypt/pull/113

[6] https://github.com/besser82/libxcrypt/pull/150

[7] https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/issues/607

[8] https://man.archlinux.org/man/pam_unix.8

As of ansible-core 2.15.3 , upstream moved documentation and examples to a separate dedicated repository (see the related changelogs ).
This means that, starting from version 2.15.3 the ansible-core package will stop shipping documentation and a default configuration example under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg .

Regarding the documentation, it is available online: https://docs.ansible.com/
As for the configuration file, as explained in the wiki , a base config can be generated with the following command:

ansible-config init --disabled > ansible.cfg

After updating from ansible-core <= 2.15.2-1 to >= 2.15.3-1 , everyone using a custom global Ansible configuration file stored under /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg will have their configuration saved as a pacsave file.
To restore it, run the following command:

mv /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.pacsave /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

When upgrading from budgie-desktop 10.7.2-5 to 10.7.2-6, the package mutter43 must be replaced with magpie-wm, which currently depends on mutter. As mutter43 conflicts with mutter, manual intervention is required to complete the upgrade.

First remove mutter43, then immediately perform the upgrade. Do not relog orreboot between these steps.

pacman -Rdd mutter43

pacman -Syu

Starting from version 2023.66594-9, TeX Live packages have been reorganized to mirror upstream collections. Even though the new texlive-basic replaces the old texlive-core , many of the texlive-core contents (including language specific files) are now split between different packages. To find out which Arch package contains a specific CTAN package, you can use the tlmgr utility, eg.

$ tlmgr info euler | grep collectioncollection:  collection-latexrecommended

which means the euler CTAN package is contained in texlive-latexrecommended . You may also use pacman -F to query for specific files.

A new metapackage texlive-meta is available to install all subpackages (except for language specific ones), and the new texlive-doc package provides the full documentation for offline use.

The openblas package prior to version 0.3.23-2 doesn't ship optimizedLAPACK routine and CBLAS/LAPACKE interfaces for compatibility. Thisdecision has been reverted now, and the ability to choose a differentdefault system BLAS/LAPACK implementation while keeping openblasinstalled is now provided to allow future co-installation of BLIS,ATLAS, etc.

The default BLAS implementation will be used for most packages likeNumPy or R. Please install "blas-openblas" and "blas64-openblas" to makeOpenBLAS the default BLAS implementation, just like the old behavior.

Unfortunately you will get errors on updating if you currently haveOpenBLAS installed as the default BLAS implementation:

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies):: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required by cblas:: installing openblas (0.3.23-2) breaks dependency 'blas' required bylapack

Please append your preferred default BLAS implementation to the regular-Syu command line to get around it. For example:

pacman -Syu blas-openblas

or

pacman -Syu blas