Arch Linux's Pacman 6.1 Released With Cache Server Support

It was two years since the release of Pacman 6.0 as Arch Linux's package manager software while overnight Pacman 6.1 was released with a tag line "it's been a while..." With Pacman 6.1 comes a few new features.

First up, Pacman 6.1 introduces the notion of cache servers. Caching servers are just like as the name implies and will be tried before attempting to fetch packages from any non-cache servers. Cache servers can be specified via the "CacheServer" option within pacman.conf. See this merge for more details of this feature that should be useful for local caching and the like for those with large Arch Linux deployments.

Pacman 6.1 also improves its --sysroot option, an extended data field is added for arbitrary package data, more informed output when encountering corrupt packages or file conflicts, improved Web Key Directory (WKD) support, better handling of malformed download headers, and various makepkg improvements. On the makepkg side with Pacman is now configurable LTO support, a "GITFLAGS" environment variable to customize checkouts, checksum support for Git/Mercurial/Bzr sources, improved stripping and debug package support, and other enhancements.

Downloads and more details on the Pacman 6.1 release for Arch Linux package management via the ArchLinux.org GitLab.