Thomas Bächler wrote:

netcfg 2.8.2 has been moved to [core]. It has been six months since netcfg had an update, so it accumulated quite some changes. Here is a shortlist.

• Configuration has moved out of rc.conf. Please move your configuration to /etc/conf.d/netcfg.
• Connection types ending in -old, -dbus and -iproute are discontinued. Remove the suffix if you still have it: you didn't need it.
• Systemd is now supported for single profile, multiple profile, automatic wired and automatic wireless connections.
• For your basic wifi needs, you can now use the bundled wifi-menu tool. It is a dialog based connection aid inspired by wifi-select.
• Disconnecting an interface is no longer done through -i. The new parameter is -D. Reconnecting an interface is possible through -R.
• There is a new connection type: PPPoE.

The full changelog is at http://projects.archlinux.org/netcfg.git/tree/NEWS?id=2.8.2

The wiki does not reflect all these changes yet, please help updating it!

Pierre Schmitz wrote:

PHP has been updated to its latest major release 5.4. The upstream changelog can be found at php.net/ChangeLog-5.php, a detailed migration guide is at php.net/migration54. In addition to this the following packaging changes have been made:

• The Suhosin patch and extension have been removed. Learn more about the reasoning behind this decision at pierre-schmitz.com/php-5-4-1-in-suhosin-out/ If you had used the suhosin extension before remove the php-suhosin package as it is no longer compatible with PHP 5.4
• Note that the extension API has been changed. If you are using any third party extensions that are not in our repositories, you have to at least recompile them or update to a compatible version.
• The json module is now built into PHP itself. Therefore, remove the extension=json.so directive from your php.ini file.
• The gd extension has been built with webp support using the libvpx library.

Make sure to merge the changes of php.ini into your local copy; or probably easier: adjust the new php.ini to your needs. If you any encounter problems using the APC extension you may try the php-xcache package which has been added to the repository.

Last but not least: especially if you are running old scripts, make sure they do not rely on features like "Safe Mode" or "Magic Quotes". As these features were removed, an update to PHP 5.4 will result in serious security holes.

Dan McGee wrote:

If you follow Arch Planet, you may have already heard the news that we are celebrating a decade of existence, with the release of 0.1 Homer on March 11, 2002. If you haven't already, grab some birthday cake and head over to Arch Planet to read several developers chronologies and wonderful words of praise for Arch Linux. There is also a brief article from The H Open Source as well as discussion on Reddit. With good fortune and a little luck, hopefully we'll be around to celebrate another 10 years!

As a way to see how far we've come, we've put together a yearly snapshot of the home page thanks to our friends at the Wayback Machine. Please don't judge our former (lack of) design too harshly! For your viewing pleasure, the home page as it existed in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Allan McRae wrote:

From the glibc-2.15-5 package, the minimum required kernel version will be increased from 2.6.27 to 2.6.32. This reflects the oldest kernel version still receiving updates upstream.

Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

Recent releases of libpng and libtiff have required a rebuild of all packages that depend on them; these have just been moved from [testing] to the main repos. As usual, remember to fully update your system and check your unofficial packages (especially the cairo-* packages from AUR) for required rebuilds.

The update might output messages similar to:

g_module_open() failed for /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-svg.so:
libpng14.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

These can be safely ignored if you use our official cairo package; otherwise you may need to reinstall librsvg.

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

The FOSDEM conference takes place on 4/5 February in Brussels, Belgium and our attendance this year is bigger than ever. On the list of Archers coming we find developers Роман Кирилич (Roman Kyrylych), Tom Gundersen, Thomas Bächler, Jan Steffens, Pierre Schmitz and myself.

We're putting together meetups on Friday afternoon, evening and Saturday evening. Our program is not definitive yet, so to stay up to date (or make suggestions) check the wiki page or the meetups thread on the arch-events mailing list.

Hope to see you there!

Dave Reisner wrote:

With module-init-tools being declared a dead project by its current maintainer, a new project has stepped up to take its place: kmod. This is intended to be a drop-in replacement, though deprecated functionality in module-init-tools has not been reimplemented.

If, upon upgrade, pacman moves /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf to a .pacsave, you should move it back. This file, and any other config read by module-init-tools, is still read by kmod. However, the kmod package will no longer include a blank config file. You'll find the same (if not more) documentation in the manpages and --help output for the binaries.

Dave Reisner wrote:

Pacman 4 has landed in [core]! Thanks to 24 contributors producing 893 commits, you'll find many new features. The one explicitly worth calling out is PGP signing. However, until the last few details regarding database signing and keyring distribution are ironed out, this is disabled in pacman's default config. If you're interested trying out package verification, please refer to the documentation on the wiki about pacman-key or Allan's blog post.

As always, please make sure to merge your pacnew files!

Tom Gundersen wrote:

As of udev-176, the Arch Linux userspace tools will no longer be able to boot kernels without devtmpfs support.

The official Arch kernels (kernel26-lts and linux) have both had devtmpfs support for a long time, so only people who compile their own kernels are potentially affected by this change.

More information about the kernel options required by udev is available in the udev README.

Tom Gundersen wrote:

When upgrading to filesystem-2011.12 there will be a conflict with /etc/mtab.

Install the package as follows:

pacman -S filesystem --force

It is strongly advised to avoid the --force or -f switch as it is not safe. However, in this particular case it is needed as deleting /etc/mtab manually would break pacman.

The reason for the conflict is that the file used to be generated at boot and hence not owned by any package. Now it is a symlink to /proc/self/mounts owned by filesystem. This change means that initscripts no longer requires write access to the rootfs (though other packages might).