Hi all,

I've just released repod 0.2.0 [1] (it is available as "repod" in our repositories). There are some significant changes in this release which allow for rudimentary handling of binary package repositories in configurable directory structures. For further information please refer to the documentation [2].

I would like to take the time and invite *everyone* (people involved with any distribution making use of pacman as well as their users - especially those with private package repositories) to participate in testing and improving repod. The project is actively maintained (although admittedly currently I am the main developer working on it and additional contributions - although present and valuable - are rare) and does bi-weekly meetings. Repod aims at generically offering the ability to maintain binary package repositories of alpm based packages. As such it transcends Arch Linux as its only client - the software is meant for Arch Linux, downstream distributions and private users alike!

TL;DR: Please help the development of repod and associated tooling as it is important for all pacman based distributions and their users.

Historically we have had quite a few distribution driven projects which allow us to do the things we do today (e.g. mkinitcpio, archiso, archweb, aurweb, dbscripts, arch-install-scripts, devtools, etc.). All of them have in common, that they lack dedicated development from time to time or are so large/old/deep that they require more than one person to "have the hat on". This being said: I do not feel comfortable being the only/ main person currently developing repod.

The project is entwined with our pursuit of moving our packaging infrastructure to a more modern, git based setup in which package sources are separated from the binary packages that are built from them (opposite to how it is currently handled with dbscripts). This process is a gradual one in which we try to decouple the source repositories from the binary package repository state, while offering certain stability guarantees when consuming and handling packages. Upcoming work will entail dealing with necessary checks required for basic movement operations, which will consolidate a lot of (partially unused) code in the dbscripts project. For a more detailed overview for further topics, please have a look at the milestones [3]. Working on the upcoming features could use many more eyes and helping hands!

Another piece of the puzzle when looking at moving to a git based workflow and improving our tooling, is the automation for builds/rebuilds (the road between our package source repositories and the binary package repository management software - e.g. repod). For this some solutions exist, some of which are VCS agnostic and some of which we use in larger rebuilds all the time. Morten has started to look at a buildbot based system which could be used for rebuild scenarios and also for building different architectures in the future. To my knowledge this is still very much a WIP, but if you are interested, idle in #archlinux-projects on libera.chat to get exposed to more information (this is also the case for repod btw!).

I hope I was able to give a brief overview of what is the current state of things, where we want to go from here and spark some enthusiam about the above projects. There is still a lot of work left to be done for us and any help is much appreciated! :)

Best, David

[1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/repod/-/tags/0.2.0 [2] https://repod.archilnux.page [3] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/repod/-/milestones