Inspired by discussions on the arch-general mailing list, test-sec-flags was created by pid1 (with help from anthraxx, strcat, sangy, and rgacogne) to test the performance impact of various security-oriented compilation and linking flags. The goal is to determine if these flags can be the new default for all Arch Linux packages. Preliminary results suggest that the performance impact is almost nonexistent compare to the compilation flags we already use, but we would like to collect and compare more results before moving forwards.
Download the source here and see the README for installation and usage instructions. The results
subdirectory contains instructions on how to pull out the relevant
statistics from the result files.
We are collecting results in the test-sec-flags wiki on Github. Please
add your results there. In particular, we would very much like i686
results, as all of the previous contributors have been on x86_64
devices.
Patches welcome.
As you upgrade to screen-4.4.0-1 you will be unable to reattach sessions started with earlier screen versions. Please make sure all your sessions are closed before upgrading.
The release of pacman-5.0 brought support for transactional hooks. These will allow us to (e.g.) run font cache updates a single time during an update rather than after each font package installation. This will both speed up the update process, but also reduce packaging burden for the Developers and Trusted Users.
In order for the use of hooks to be started, we require all users to have updated to at least pacman-5.0.1 before 2016-04-23. Pacman-5.0.1 was released on 2016-02-23, so this will have given everyone two months to update their system.
Packages of the new major version of PHP have been released into the stable repositories. Besides the new PHP 7 features there are the following packaging changes. In general the package configuration is now closer to what was intended by the PHP project. Also refer to the PHP 7 migration guide for upstream improvements.
Removed packages
- php-pear
- php-mssql
- php-ldap The module is now included in the php package
- php-mongo The new php-mongodb might provide an alternative even though it is not a compatible drop-in replacement
- php-xcache Consider using the included OPcache and optionally APCu for user data cache
- graphviz The ...
Since the KDE 4 desktop has been unmaintained for several months and it's becoming increasingly difficult to support two versions of Plasma, we are removing it from our repositories. Plasma 5.5 has just been released and should be stable enough to replace it.
KDE 4 installations will not be automatically upgraded to Plasma 5. However, we recommend all users to upgrade or switch to a maintained alternative as soon as possible, since any future update may break the KDE 4 desktop without prior notice. See the wiki for instructions on how to upgrade to Plasma 5.
