[arch-dev-public] Arch monthly report December 2021

[Levente Polyak]

## Report

The pad for the next January 2022 report is available at [0].

## Staff

We are happy to welcome artafinde [1] among the Trusted Users. 
Additionally Segaja has applied [2] to become a Trusted User and the 
vote is currently in progress.

## mkinitcpio

A new mkinitcpio version v31 has been released [3]. Besides various nice 
improvements the biggest highligh of this release is support for efi 
stub generation [4].

There is also a new wiki page for Unified kernel images [5].

## Keyring

The new keyringctl tooling has been finalized and merged. The next steps 
are to convert the keyring data using the new tooling to a curated 
source of truth.

Additionally we have started to replace packager keys that were not 
meeting our latest strength requirements [6] and to ensure that each key 
has a dedicated @archlinux.org UID. The goal is that for packaging 
purpose we only sign @archlinux.org UIDs with the main keys but still 
allow web-of-trust cross-sigs issued from packager keys.

## Devtools

A new devtools version 20211129 has been released [7]. The new devtools 
package is waiting in [staging] for the python 3.10 rebuild to finish in 
order to avoid additional hassle with an already cumbersome rebuild.

LTO has additionally been enabled is this release as the issues should 
be easy to spot and extremely simple to work around by just setting an 
`options` knob inside the PKGBUILD.

Once devtools has been moved out of [testing], a wide ranged rebuild is 
planned to make use of the new flags on a broad scale.

## Python

The process to upgrade to Python 3.10 has started and we are currently 
rebuilding [8] all Python packages.

Packagers are also actively working on removing Python 2 from the 
repositories. Packages used for development, like python2-virtualenv and 
python2-pip, was recently removed [9] and there is work under way to 
clear out rest of the python2 packages.


## archinstall

A new archinstall version 2.3.0 has been released [10] with a lot of new 
functionality and improvements. Most notably it contains:

  * GRUB and Disk Encryption now properly works and supports multiple 
encrypted volumes.
  * BTRFS subvolumes *(beta only supports a nested structure [11] and 
has some known issues [12])*
  * A rudimentary plugin-support [13], allowing users to create their 
own plugins.
  * swap [14] has been added into the mix using zram [15] and 
zram-generator [16].

## Reproducible Builds

A new rebuilderd version has been released that supports build groups, 
meaning it's now possible to have one build reproduce multiple artifacts 
at once. This aids being able to check split packages more efficiently 
instead of building the whole group multiple times for every single 
split artifact.

archlinux-repro has also had a new bugfix release [17].


[0] https://md.archlinux.org/Hu6IMKXCTLa9bv0yh-WCrg
[1] 
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-October/036617.html
[2] 
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2021-November/036672.html
[3] https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/releases/tag/v31
[4] https://linderud.dev/blog/mkinitcpio-v31-and-uefi-stubs/
[5] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_kernel_image
[6] 
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-keyring/-/wikis/best-practices
[7] https://github.com/archlinux/devtools/releases/tag/20211129
[8] 
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2021-November/030564.html
[9] 
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2021-November/030555.html
[10] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archinstall/-/tags/v2.3.0
[11] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SysadminGuide#Nested
[12] https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/718
[13] 
https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/blob/master/archinstall/lib/plugins.py
[14] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap
[15] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html
[16] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#zram-generator
[17] https://github.com/archlinux/archlinux-repro/releases/tag/20211205
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