Arch Linux Could Use Some Help With Toolchain Maintenance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arch Linux Could Use Some Help With Toolchain Maintenance

While Arch Linux is known to be at the forefront of rolling-release Linux distributions, when it comes to its compiler toolchain the packages have fallen behind over the past year...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arch-Toolchain-Falling-Behind

[lumks]

A perfect opportunity for Manjaro or any downstream distro to step up and give back something of value to the whole stack/team instead of just virusing the crap out of Arch upstream work and make money with it.

[KaoDome]

As I began reading the article I was thinking "Oh... What happened to Alan? 😔" It's been a while, but I remember using his toolchains targeting MinGW at least, I didn't know he wasn't involved in these (anymore?).

From what I could read there are several differences between his alternative toolchain and the one in use, but I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to adopt his instead.

[ms178]

Thanks for this news piece, the situation is less than ideal. Such crucial packages need a good maintainer and as there are other packaging efforts underway downstream, I wonder why that is not a focus for these projects to invest their time to optimize it, too. Thanks to the dire state I had to learn how to build a profiled GCC myself (thank you Clear Linux for some inspiration for optimizations!), but Glibc is a beast, I get segfaults in crucial programs like Chrome or symbol errors and never succeeded there. Maybe I hit some bugs or problems with the PKGBUILDS, also the build order is important... but that was a rather frustrating experience as it takes down the whole system and cannot be saved from a chroot environment.

Update: Reading through the Arch-thread with some more glory details, the technical details for solving these problems are over my head - especially dealing with the build failures. Also Arch and all of the other downstream projects seem to be in a bad state if they cannot provide security updates any longer to this crucial part of the system. This screams for more automatation, automated building and testing. Was Valve aware of these issues when they made their decision to switch to Arch? Will they come to the rescue and invest the needed ressources here?!

[Sethox]

As I began reading the article I was thinking "Oh... What happened to Alan? 😔" It's been a while, but I remember using his toolchains targeting MinGW at least, I didn't know he wasn't involved in these (anymore?).

From what I could read there are several differences between his alternative toolchain and the one in use, but I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to adopt his instead.

The way I read this article, lack of manpower for such a big project. Or it can be interpreted as "not enough interest".

[Setif]

There are many people who want to update ArchLinux packages, the problem is that is not open to everyone.
They could open package repository (I mean PKGBUILDs repos) -after migrating to git- and review the PRs/MRs from anyone.
They have already Testing repo, so if something goes wrong they could revert that change.
Getting involved - ArchWiki (archlinux.org)
Trusted Users - ArchWiki (archlinux.org)

[mirmirmir]

A perfect opportunity for Manjaro or any downstream distro to step up and give back something of value to the whole stack/team instead of just virusing the crap out of Arch upstream work and make money with it.

I heard valve is making a distro based on arch. Although, i kind of doubt this decision until i see the final product

[andre30correia]

amateur distro have this problem

[enihcam]

Manjaro can help. It would be good if two communities could united together or help each other in a feasible way.

[bitman]

A perfect opportunity for Manjaro or any downstream distro to step up and give back something of value to the whole stack/team instead of just virusing the crap out of Arch upstream work and make money with it.

People are GNU maximalists until someone does something within rights provided by the license that they do not like.