[pacman-dev] The time has come- pacman 3.1 testing releases

[Dan McGee]

The time has come. I really want to get pacman 3.1 out the door, and
to do that, we need to test this thing a lot.

I am currently ONLY supporting i686, and you will need libarchive
2.4.0 installed from testing. However, if anyone on this list would
like to step forward and volunteer to build the package for x86_64, I
will gladly host the built package.

I've provided the PKGBUILD and accompanying files. You can use
versionpkg to build this package on your own, or once you have pacman
3.1 installed makepkg has versionpkg functionality built right in so
you can just use that to rebuild a new version.

Notable changes and things to know:
1. The sync DBs are now in a sync/ subdir in your pacman DB directory.
Thus, the old top-level dbs are obsolete. This should hopefully
clearly separate the local and sync dbs and keep people from wiping
that important local one.
2. I WOULD NOT recommend using the --root option at this point. I
still need to make some fixes, and its behavior wrt other path options
is a lot different than pacman 3.0.X.
3. Consolidated mirrorlists- you don't need 5 of them anymore. See
below for a bit more info on this, and take a look at the installed
/etc/pacman.conf and /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist files.

So without further ado, instructions for upgrading/testing (PLEASE
read all instructions before actually doing the upgrade!):

1. Because this package will replace your stock pacman, you either
need to put the package in your own local repo, or add my [pacman]
repo to your pacman.conf. The second is probably a safer bet and will
allow you to get updates I make to the package anyway. Once you add
the repo, the package name is pacman-git.

2. Once installed, you will see that you get a whole bunch of pacsave
files. A lot of these are related to the mirrorlists being
consolidated into one "mirrorlist" file instead of having 5 separate
but basically identical lists. I kept these on my system just so I can
use the pacman2.static binary if something goes horribly wrong. (Of
course, you would have to remove the pacsave extension from all of
these files to use them).

3. A pacman2.static binary has been included in the package, just in
case. Hopefully no one needs to use it.

4. One issue is kind of weird, and may be a bug in the way we do
replaces handling. Your original pacman.conf will be moved to
pacman.conf.pacsave, and the new one installed as pacman.conf. Of
course, you will need to do some merging of the config files, but
unfortunately they end up backwards from the norm.

5. Point 4 also applies for makepkg.conf, but the contents of this
file have changed enough that you should probably just start a new one
anyway.

A note to testers- please let me know if anything in your upgrade path
is different from above. This will really help us later when it comes
to finalizing the real upgrade path. And if you hit a problem, please
submit a full report to the mailling list and/or Flyspray (this means
a descriptive title, steps to reproduce, and --debug output).

I have this installed, so don't worry too much about it killing your system. :P

And now the links and stuff:
Package/DB: http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git/
PKGBUILD/files: http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git/pacman-git/

pacman.conf entry:
[pacman-git]
Server = http://www.archlinux.org/~dan/pacman-git/

-Dan