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Official Arch Linux image for WSL
by Robin Candau 17 Apr '25

17 Apr '25

Hi everyone, I'm writing this mail to collect thoughts and interests about providing an official Arch Linux image for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) [1]. Indeed, after a quick related discussion over on IRC, I started tinkering with this and I personally would be eventually interested in proposing this "officially", if that's of interest. This proposal is inspired by the related Fedora one [2] (which was accepted and planned for Fedora 42). # Benefits An official Arch Linux image for WSL would provide an easy way for people to give Arch Linux a try directly from their Windows system, making our distro more "discoverable" and accessible. Additionally, some people may have no other choice but to use Windows in specific situations (despite not necessarily being the best choice for their needs / duties), e.g. on their company's workstation (like it's the case for me). While WSL consists of an acceptable solution to get access to a Linux environment in such situations, the lack of an official image for Arch Linux either "suggests" the use of a different distribution or "forces" people to rely on unofficial Arch Linux WSL images (which quality may vary). # Distribution / Installation WSL images can be distributed via tarballs, Appx packages, or via the Windows Store. From what we know, distributing images from the Windows Store implies agreeing to the store policies & developer agreement, and may imply additional eventual concerns related to TOS/EULA. I unfortunately don't have much details on that front currently but I think that distribution from the Windows Store should be out of scope for now. Moreover, since version 2.4.4, WSL greatly improved the way to install tarballs outside from the store by adding "click-to-install" support for tarballs using the ".wsl" extension, as well as automatic first setup script support. As such, I would personally advice for that distribution method for the time being. Indeed, downloading such an Arch Linux ".wsl" tarball and (double) clicking on it would be all that's needed to be able to use Arch Linux with WSL. Note that WSL 2.4.4 and greater are still qualified as pre-releases at the time I'm writing those lines [3], but can still be installed with a single command line from a PowerShell prompt (`wsl --update --pre-release` from a system with WSL2 installed). If anything, installing such tarballs from WSL prior to 2.4.4 can still be done "manually" via a single command line (`wsl --import <DistroName> <InstallationPath> <TarballPath>`). With a proper documentation, using Arch Linux with WSL prior to 2.4.4 would still be pretty straightforward. # Technical details WSL2 provides a single virtual machine managed by the Windows host which runs guest Linux distributions as containers. As such, the Arch Linux base container image [4] can already be used for basic WSL support. To define some default parameters and provide additional functionalities, some specific WSL configuration files can be added to it. This, for instance, allows to add `systemd` support out of the box [5], define default parameters (e.g. default user, icon for the app shortcut or terminal profile) and automatic first setup script (which can be used to create a default non-root user and perform basic system setup interactively at first run for instance) [6]. The archive just needs to be renamed from ".tar.zst" to ".wsl" to allow "click-to-install" with WSL >= 2.4.4. For those interested, I actually "built" such a ".wsl" Arch Linux tarball [7] based on our latest base container image which can be installed & uses with WSL2 (made for test purposes). Make sure to read the README [8], which contains important information such as how the tarball was generated and how to use it. # Tarball maintenance / management Given that the WSL tarball would be based on our Docker / Container image, it could eventually be maintained in the same repo [4], although I'm not sure that mixing a WSL specific image with our "Docker" images is desirable. We also have the arch-boxes repo [9] which provides multiple kind of Arch images (vagrant, qcow2, cloud...). I think a WSL image could fit well there. Alternatively, a new dedicated repo could be created. When it comes to actual maintenance / management, I think the image generation and releasing should be fairly easy to automate via a scheduled GitLab CI (as it is currently done for our Docker images for instance). The process is fairly straightforward (grab latest base Docker image / tarball, un-archive it, add a few WSL specific files, re-archive it, rename it from ".tar.zst" to ".wsl"). I guess a monthly generation / release would be more than enough. We would still need a few people to watch over and feel responsible to maintain this. I'd happily be one of them, but please feel free to express interest :) # Unresolved questions / issues From a purely technical stand point, there is one pending issue which, fortunately, can be easily worked around. But the actual root cause and proper fix are unknown yet. See the last section of the README [8] for more details. On another level, I guess the important point here is to determine if we actually want this and, if so, how? For instance, which level of support do we want to provide (if we are to do this)? Since it would be pretty close in terms of "design" and usage, I personally think we could provide a similar level of support than the Docker images & Arch boxes images. Anyway, sorry for the long read 0:) Just to clarify, the actual purpose of this mail is to collect thoughts, concerns, questions, interests (both regarding using such an "official" Arch Linux WSL image and / or helping maintaining it), ... Please, share opinions if you have some :) [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FedoraWSL [3] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases [4] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-docker [5] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-is-now-available… [6] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-uisns/windows/wsl/build-custom-distro#add-th… [7] https://pkgbuild.com/~antiz/WSL/ [8] https://pkgbuild.com/~antiz/WSL/README.md [9] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-boxes -- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz

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Packaging repositories are now automatically archived upon inactivity
by Jelle van der Waa 17 Apr '25

17 Apr '25

Hi everyone, Thanks to Levente reviewing, fixing and deploying a new gluebuddy. Packaging repositories which have no activity for the last 30 days are now automatically archived, making it clearer to users that this package is not available in our repositories when browsing/searching GitLab. If a package repository was archived which you still want to work on, please reach out to the devops team to unarchive it. Due to GitLab permissions issues we cannot allow packagers via pkgctl to unarchive a repository. Greetings, Jelle

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GHC 9.4.8 enters [extra-testing]
by Felix Yan 03 Apr '25

03 Apr '25

Hi all, The long delayed GHC 9.4.x updates have been done and moved to [extra-testing]. Two obsolete packages were retired from the distribution. If you still have them installed, please consider removing them: - haskell-configurator - haskell-critbit Many thanks again to @Vekhir who helped me a lot for preparing this batch and many previous batches of Haskell updates. As always, please report any issues and have fun! -- Regards, Felix Yan

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Spring cleanup '25
by Antonio Rojas 02 Apr '25

02 Apr '25

Time to clean up old cruft again. Please head to https://archlinux.org/devel/reports/unneeded-orphans/ and adopt packages you want to keep in the repos. For reference, a current list of packages is attached (but this may vary if packages are adopted/disowned). If you adopt a package from the list, make sure to check its dependencies and also adopt them in case they are orphan. This is also a good time to check your out-of-date packages and disown the ones you no longer have interest in/time to maintain, so they can find a maintainer in the official repos or otherwise in AUR. Keeping packages out of date and/or with unfixed issues for months/years is not ideal and can be detrimental to the overall quality of our distro in the long run. I will start dropping packages to AUR in ~ 10 days. ack acpilight arc-solid-gtk-theme arduino-builder aspell-da b43-fwcutter caja-actions echoping flterm fusesoc gauche gmrun gpgit gradle7 hitch hq kakoune-lsp lastpass-cli libutp libxml++2.6-docs log4cpp lxsplit mailgraph med-openmpi megatools molecule-plugins netcf obconf ophcrack perl-app-borgrestore perl-config-simple perl-cpanplus-dist-arch perl-data-messagepack perl-dir-self perl-statistics-descriptive physlock pinta psiconv python-clint python-glfw python-migen python-nptyping python-olm python-pyswip python-sounddevice reflector rhino-javadoc rp-pppoe ruby-cairo sc scim-chewing sipcalc smokeping snap-sync spampd swaks sx t-prot taskd tenshi tree-sitter-bash tree-sitter-python ttf-joypixels vbam-sdl vbam-wx web-ext wldash xautolock xcftools xplc

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Heads up: cmake 4 may cause build failures
by Antonio Rojas 27 Mar '25

27 Mar '25

cmake 4 (currently in testing) removes support for cmake_minimum_required values below 3.5. This may cause build failures especially for unmaintained or poorly maintained upstream projects. Those can be fixed by increasing the cmake_minimum_required value in CMakeLists.txt. Note that this will change the default value of some policies so may cause some behavior change. Also, OLD vaue for some deprecated policies is no longer supported. If whatever the policy's OLD behavior does is still needed, it will need to be set in some other way. Check the specific policy's documentation for more info.

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Re: Spring cleanup '25
by Chih-Hsuan Yen 22 Mar '25

22 Mar '25

Antonio Rojas <arojas(a)archlinux.org> 於 2025年3月22日週六下午6:50寫道： > > Time to clean up old cruft again. Please head to https://archlinux.org/devel/reports/unneeded-orphans/ and adopt packages you want to keep in the repos. For reference, a current list of packages is attached (but this may vary if packages are adopted/disowned). If you adopt a package from the list, make sure to check its dependencies and also adopt them in case they are orphan. > > This is also a good time to check your out-of-date packages and disown the ones you no longer have interest in/time to maintain, so they can find a maintainer in the official repos or otherwise in AUR. Keeping packages out of date and/or with unfixed issues for months/years is not ideal and can be detrimental to the overall quality of our distro in the long run. > > I will start dropping packages to AUR in ~ 10 days. > > ack > acpilight > arc-solid-gtk-theme > arduino-builder > aspell-da > b43-fwcutter > caja-actions > echoping > flterm > fusesoc > gauche > gmrun > gpgit > gradle7 > hitch > hq > kakoune-lsp > lastpass-cli > libutp > libxml++2.6-docs > log4cpp > lxsplit > mailgraph > med-openmpi > megatools > molecule-plugins > netcf > obconf > ophcrack > perl-app-borgrestore > perl-config-simple > perl-cpanplus-dist-arch > perl-data-messagepack > perl-dir-self > perl-statistics-descriptive > physlock > pinta > psiconv > python-clint > python-glfw > python-migen > python-nptyping > python-olm > python-pyswip > python-sounddevice > reflector > rhino-javadoc > rp-pppoe > ruby-cairo > sc > scim-chewing > sipcalc > smokeping > snap-sync > spampd > swaks > sx > t-prot > taskd > tenshi > tree-sitter-bash > tree-sitter-python > ttf-joypixels > vbam-sdl > vbam-wx > web-ext > wldash > xautolock > xcftools > xplc > > > > Thank you for organizing the event. I orphaned some packages that I'm not going to maintain anymore, and some of them become unneeded-orphans. * libkscreen5 * libqt5xdg * lxqt-build-tools-qt5 * python-django-fake-model * python-pynamodb * python-sshpubkeys Best, Chih-Hsuan Yen (yan12125)

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Final Comment Period: RFC40 amendment
by Morten Linderud 19 Mar '25

19 Mar '25

Yo, We don't have an amendment process for RFCs, but we need to fix up a small part of RFC40 for the REUSE RFC and remove the custom 0BSD license text. I'm putting the amendmend up for a final comment period for any issues or feedback. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/49 The intention is to extend the RFC process with a proper amendment procedure at a later point. -- Morten Linderud PGP: 9C02FF419FECBE16

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RFC Final Comment Period: Upstream package sources
by David Runge 19 Mar '25

19 Mar '25

An RFC has now entered Final Comment Period. In 14 days, discussion will end and the proposal will either be accepted, rejected or withdrawn: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/46 Please visit the above link for discussion. Summary: Improve the security of Arch Linux distribution packages by relying on transparent and, if possible, cryptographically verifiable upstream sources by default. Provide guidelines and best practices for distribution package maintainers in a document covering various source types and technologies for digital signatures. Communicate the common goal of transparent and secure package delivery for package maintainers as well as upstream project maintainers.

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RFC Final Comment Period: Shorten default TCP keepalive time
by Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) 11 Mar '25

11 Mar '25

An RFC has now entered its Final Comment Period. In 14 days, the discussion will end and the proposal will either be accepted, rejected or withdrawn: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/51 Please visit the above link for discussion. Summary: Set our default `net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time` to override the extremely conservative kernel default.

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RFC: REUSE for package license linting
by Morten Linderud 11 Mar '25

11 Mar '25

A new RFC (request for comment) has been opened here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/rfcs/-/merge_requests/52 Please visit the above link for discussion. Summary: Utilize REUSE for package license linting for all package sources. -- Morten Linderud PGP: 9C02FF419FECBE16

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