[2019-03-25 00:46:15 +0100] Morten Linderud via arch-dev-public:
On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 04:39:54PM -0700, Andrew Gregory via arch-dev-public wrote:
I don't consider hoping that libarchive doesn't need a rebuild in the near future a great strategy. That being said, this is really a question of how long of a period we need between libarchive v3.3.3 and us making the switch. I'm not a packager, so I don't have much of an opinion on that.
Well, we pride ourselves with having competent users. I think waiting a year is conservative and safe. However, personally I think we can wait for the next pacman release and write an announcment. Then we give everyone a month to update and we can have a smooth transition. Assuming of course that everyone is on-board with this change.
So far we all seem to agree it's a change for the better. However your timeline is confused: we only need to wait for a new pacman release to start building zstd-compressed packages; we can then push them to the repos straight away, assuming users have had enough time to update libarchive-3.3.3. It's already been in [core] for more than six months. Traditionally we wait a year before pushing changes that break backward compatibility. That always seemed a bit extreme to me so I'd personally be fine with doing the switch in a month or two with certain precautions: - Post an announcement warning users they'll need libarchive-3.3.3 or higher a month from now and telling them to update if they haven't done so in the last six months. - Prepare a static build of libarchive-3.3.3 compressed with xz and write a wiki page with detailed instructions on how to manually switch from an old system (for users who might want to switch even later). Cheers. -- Gaetan