Arch Linux's Pacman 6.0 Enters Alpha With Parallel Downloads Support

Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0.

Pacman 6.0 has reached alpha today in marking the point the Arch Linux developers are seeking more widespread testing.

The main feature of Pacman 6.0 as it concerns end-users is support for parallel downloads for being able to download packages in parallel as well as the package database metadata. This should shorten up the overall installation process, assuming your Internet is fast enough to keep up with the concurrent downloads.

Details on Pacman 6.0 Alpha via this blog post by Arch developer Allan McRae. The video embedded below is Allan's demonstration of the parallel downloads in action.