Hi All, This is the first of hopefully a monthly mail on the first day of the month on the progress of important parts of our distribution. If have something which should be included, please pm / mail me. Or add it to the pad. https://md.archlinux.org/ejoz5fgLTzaSxlBBZcgphA Now for the news: ## Devtools A new devtools release is being prepared with it's most notable changes: [0] * Now licensed to GPLv3 * devtools now records the used BUILDTOOL / BUILDTOOLVER in BUILDINFO, this is required for when we need to reproduce an old package which was build with a different devtools version then the current. (And devtools changed the CFLAGS, etc.) * makerepropkg now supports reading BUILDTOOL / BUILDTOOLVER from a BUILDINFO file and use the makepkg.conf from the correct devtools version. * pacman's makepkg.conf is synced with new hardening CFLAGS such as `-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fstack-clash-protection -fcf-protection` * More missing man pages have been added for archbuild, makechrootpkg, arch-nspawn. ## DBScripts There has been great progress on debug support for dbscripts , review and testing is very much appreciated. [1] Dbscripts was moved to Gitlab with Gitlab CI coverage integration. ## Keyring The archlinux-keyring project gained new tooling called keyringctl to more easily handle the distribution's chain of trust, identify problems with packager keys and allow for a git-based workflow around addition, signing and revocation of packager and main signing keys. The keyring will become a curated source of truth and removes dependency on remote keyservers. [2] archlinux-keyring is now also moved to Gitlab with Gitlab CI coverage integration. ## aurweb Aurweb is being rewritten in Python using FastAPI, an announcement has been posted that the new port can be tested on https://aur-dev.archlinux.org [3] The AUR now provides metadata archives of all AUR packages, to offload requests from the AUR RPC interface. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages-meta-v1.json.gz https://aur.archlinux.org/packages-meta-ext-v1.json.gz For more information see the post on aur-general. [4] ## Arch Linux website A MR has been made to make our navbar responsive and in the future archweb (archlinux.org) responsive in this PR. Moving to SASS also makes it easier to get a working dark mode. [5] [6] Additionally a new archweb release should have a feature to add a note to a package to show why it's outdated. [7] ## releng The monthly release artifacts (i.e. installation medium, bootstrap image, iPXE images) can now be built in GitLab CI and are released automatically on a monthly basis in the releng project. [8] To further automate the release process on the main repository server, arch-release-promotion is about to be tested for the promotion and synchronization of release artifacts in the relevant projects (i.e. releng or arch-boxes). This will enable for a streamlined and automated update of the Arch Linux website with new release information. [9] A related ticket tracks the work on restructuring the output directory to offer a unified approach to non-package releases on the main repository server in the future. [10] [0] https://github.com/archlinux/devtools/compare/20210202...master [1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/dbscripts/-/merge_requests/21 [2] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-keyring/-/merge_requests/24 [3] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-October/036614.html [4] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-November/036659.html [5] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-common-style/-/merge_reques... [6] https://github.com/archlinux/archweb/pull/382 [7] https://github.com/archlinux/archweb/issues/269 [8] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/releng [9] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-release-promotion [10] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/releng/-/issues/11