Similar to other Linux distributions beginning to make use of Facebook's Zstd (Zstandard) compression algorithm for faster compression/decompression of packages, Arch Linux is doing the same. Their findings mirror that of others in allowing faster compression/decompression performance with a similar compression ratio for binaries to that of XZ.
With Pacman 5.2, the Zstd package compression is being rolled out for Arch Linux while ahead of that is a bulletin today that users need a libarchive within the past year. Since September 2018 has been a libarchive on Arch Linux supporting Zstd, but if for some reason you are running an Arch Linux install with a very outdated libarchive, you will want to update soon to avoid issues moving forward.
More details on this notice via ArchLinux.org.
32 Comments
