Arch Linux's Pacman 5.2 Released - Drops Support For Delta Packages, Adds Zstd Support

[polarathene]

It might be b/c we're only two tech guys here, but we run an Arch server here in my company and have had no problems in the 4 years the server has been running.
On the other hand, I've never ended up feeling comfortable using Fedora, and I've really tried

If you update it regularly and aren't using anything from AUR, it'd probably be fine? Most issues I've had with Arch updates is from AUR or DE related updates which required some manual work to resolve conflicts or other issues. I've also had some problems when I went overseas for a few months and came back to do an update which required some fiddling around to resolve issues preventing an update.

[polarathene]

This is a config line in makepkg.conf, effective when you build your own packages (including AUR helpers). These options are compression parameters. -T0 enables multithreaded compression. For the rest see the manpage of zstd.

It's the makepkg.conf line for zstd enabling multi-threading & adaptive compression between levels 7 and 19. The rest are just the standard compression/suppression settings makepkg uses. It's fast with decent results.

Ah ok thanks for that, I've tweaked makepkg.conf before to use more threads for building some time ago, maybe did something else. I'm aware they're params for zstd, just not familiar with them as I haven't used it via CLI much myself. The adapt param sounds interesting.

[skeevy420]

Ah ok thanks for that, I've tweaked makepkg.conf before to use more threads for building some time ago, maybe did something else. I'm aware they're params for zstd, just not familiar with them as I haven't used it via CLI much myself. The adapt param sounds interesting.

By default, none of the compressors defined in makepkg.conf use multithreading so it's worth it to add -T0 to the xz line as well.

[ypnos]

It might be b/c we're only two tech guys here, but we run an Arch server here in my company and have had no problems in the 4 years the server has been running.
On the other hand, I've never ended up feeling comfortable using Fedora, and I've really tried

Same situation here and everything worked very well. One thing though, Arch obviously includes major releases in the rolling updates. So other than with Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora server distributions, these can happen anytime. Examples in our case were MariaDB and Mono. Newer MariaDB broke replication, which we only found _after_ upgrading the db to new MariaDB version (doh!). Sure you can restore the DB from the backup SQL snapshot, but in our case that alone takes half a day. And newer Mono also didn't work for us, here we could reinstall older package version (something that is not always trivially possible due to ABI incompabilities).

Basically you have to be prepared to handle every upgrade like a dist-upgrade in other distributions. That may include longer downtimes while issues are resolved or the software in question is manually downgraded (maybe even need to compile own package against the newer libs in the system).

On the other hand, there is no distinct security updates. So you *have* to do the update, fairly regularly, and fix problems that arise.
Whereas with the others, you can plan ahead for the dist-upgrade and schedule it, while still being on the safe side regarding security.

Our server is an internal compute server so this is fine for us. Using newest kernels and also application versions was important for us to get most of the brand new Epyc servers, with Ubuntu Server we would stay on subpar performance for quite a while. But it is an issue you need to be well aware of when making the decision to run an Arch server.

[polarathene]

By default, none of the compressors defined in makepkg.conf use multithreading so it's worth it to add -T0 to the xz line as well.

Can't you force zstd to always be used by makepkg? Why would you need to update other compression options then?

[skeevy420]

Can't you force zstd to always be used by makepkg? Why would you need to update other compression options then?

Yeah, go to the bottom of makepkg.conf and change .xz/.gz to .zst. That was more of an FYI, for the time being comment.

PKGEXT='.pkg.tar.[B]xz[/B]'
SRCEXT='.src.tar.[B]xz[/B]'