Arch Linux Nears Roll-Out Of Zstd Compressed Packages For Faster Pacman Installs

[tildearrow]

That's pretty nice, considering Arch is already substantially faster than most distros at handling installs.

I was about to make that comment...
APT is just too slow and takes forever. pacman is incredibly fast when installing and just does the right thing.
It only takes a while when first doing pacman -S (15 seconds or so) but subsequent operations are quick.

[holunder]

It doesn't matter how small the packages are, pacman still doesn't clear its cache so your drive will fill up eventually. Probably one of the few annoyances I have with Arch, another one being I haven't figured out how to set a systemd job to clear pacman's cache from time to time

Just change CacheDir = in /etc/pacman.conf to /tmp

[caligula]

paccache in the package pacman-contrib cleans the cache, keeping the last 3 by default. It comes with paccache.timer to run weekly. This is all in the pacman wiki page.

One could also write a custom pacman wrapper with:
find /var/dunno/arch/package/cache -mtime +30 -exec sudo rm "{}" \;

This will delete everything older than 30 days.

[Grogan]

The reason the package cache isn't cleared, is so you can use a rollback utility (or pacman -U) to downgrade to local packages instead of hoping it's still in the Arch Archive.

I always clear it with pacman when I think of it (or before I take a tarball backup of my system).

pacman -Scc

[dielectrics]

One could also write a custom pacman wrapper with:
find /var/dunno/arch/package/cache -mtime +30 -exec sudo rm "{}" \;

This will delete everything older than 30 days.

True, but it is a good idea to keep at least a couple old packages in case you need to downgrade. If you don't have them, you have to use the Arch Linux Archive to downgrade. This is made easier if you install `downgrade` from the AUR. But since I don't downgrade very often, it's easy enough to run pacman -U <old package name>.

[R41N3R]

I use paccache as well, it works great and saves some time!

It's great to see that pacman will use zstd soon. Next step is to compress initrd with it as well by default :-)

[bug77]

I personally wrote a shell script that updates my system (including AUR packages), checks for orphans, then clears cache, all in 1 go. I wrote it to optionally retain the cache in the event I feel I should keep something. Makes life much easier.
If you really don't care about ever keeping the cache, you can always mount it to /tmp.

I've scripted those, too, but my clear cache is a separate script.

It's literally the first option listed under Sync.

Huh?

Just change CacheDir = in /etc/pacman.conf to /tmp

Clearing cache on each reboot kinda defeats the purpose of having a cache, doesn't it?

[markc]

If you don't ever need to rollback then this update alias is dead simple...

alias u='sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm ; sudo  pacman -Sc --noconfirm'

[polarathene]

Clearing cache on each reboot kinda defeats the purpose of having a cache, doesn't it?

That'd depend how often you reboot, I often have uptime of 1-2 months, although if I update a kernel that tends to increase my desire to reboot due to the booted kernels modules being deleted :/

[hotaru]

I use paccache as well, it works great and save some time!

It's great to see that pacman will use zstd soon. Next step is to compress initrd with it as well by default :-)

uncompressed is faster, even on spinning rust.

the only place I use a compressed initrd is on my Raspberry Pi, with it's slower-than-spinning-rust SD card, and for some reason the kernel there decompresses gzip faster than it decompresses lz4.