Allan McRae wrote:

From the glibc-2.15-5 package, the minimum required kernel version will be increased from 2.6.27 to 2.6.32. This reflects the oldest kernel version still receiving updates upstream.

Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

Recent releases of libpng and libtiff have required a rebuild of all packages that depend on them; these have just been moved from [testing] to the main repos. As usual, remember to fully update your system and check your unofficial packages (especially the cairo-* packages from AUR) for required rebuilds.

The update might output messages similar to:

g_module_open() failed for /usr/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-svg.so:
libpng14.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

These can be safely ignored if you use our official cairo package; otherwise you may need to reinstall librsvg.

Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

The FOSDEM conference takes place on 4/5 February in Brussels, Belgium and our attendance this year is bigger than ever. On the list of Archers coming we find developers Роман Кирилич (Roman Kyrylych), Tom Gundersen, Thomas Bächler, Jan Steffens, Pierre Schmitz and myself.

We're putting together meetups on Friday afternoon, evening and Saturday evening. Our program is not definitive yet, so to stay up to date (or make suggestions) check the wiki page or the meetups thread on the arch-events mailing list.

Hope to see you there!

Dave Reisner wrote:

With module-init-tools being declared a dead project by its current maintainer, a new project has stepped up to take its place: kmod. This is intended to be a drop-in replacement, though deprecated functionality in module-init-tools has not been reimplemented.

If, upon upgrade, pacman moves /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf to a .pacsave, you should move it back. This file, and any other config read by module-init-tools, is still read by kmod. However, the kmod package will no longer include a blank config file. You'll find the same (if not more) documentation in the manpages and --help output for the binaries.

Dave Reisner wrote:

Pacman 4 has landed in [core]! Thanks to 24 contributors producing 893 commits, you'll find many new features. The one explicitly worth calling out is PGP signing. However, until the last few details regarding database signing and keyring distribution are ironed out, this is disabled in pacman's default config. If you're interested trying out package verification, please refer to the documentation on the wiki about pacman-key or Allan's blog post.

As always, please make sure to merge your pacnew files!

Tom Gundersen wrote:

As of udev-176, the Arch Linux userspace tools will no longer be able to boot kernels without devtmpfs support.

The official Arch kernels (kernel26-lts and linux) have both had devtmpfs support for a long time, so only people who compile their own kernels are potentially affected by this change.

More information about the kernel options required by udev is available in the udev README.

Tom Gundersen wrote:

When upgrading to filesystem-2011.12 there will be a conflict with /etc/mtab.

Install the package as follows:

pacman -S filesystem --force

It is strongly advised to avoid the --force or -f switch as it is not safe. However, in this particular case it is needed as deleting /etc/mtab manually would break pacman.

The reason for the conflict is that the file used to be generated at boot and hence not owned by any package. Now it is a symlink to /proc/self/mounts owned by filesystem. This change means that initscripts no longer requires write access to the rootfs (though other packages might).

Ionuț Mircea Bîru wrote:

On October 23rd the data center where our server is located had a power failure. The server was rebooted and at the first look everything was fine.

In the morning we noticed that the performance was bad and started to investigate and found out that one of the hard disks was failing.

The drive has been replaced and is now synchronizing.

Update: A few hours after the server was back online, MySQL found out that the bbs db had been corrupted. We have restored a backup from Mon Oct 24 09:47:59 CEST 2011. Unfortunately all forum posts made after this date have been lost.

We are sorry for the long downtime.

Tom Gundersen wrote:

Summary: Please manually delete /etc/profile.d/locale.sh before updating. If . /etc/rc.conf fails in your login shell, please read the full announcement.

Changes to locale handling:

/etc/profile.d/locale.sh is now a static file that sources the correct config files in order to set your locale, rather than being generated at boot. The benefit of this is one less write to /etc, and it allows changes to the locale to take effect without rebooting (just relogin).

We add support for /etc/locale.conf. The settings in this file takes precedence over /etc/rc.conf, and those who use shells that cannot source /etc/rc.conf are required to move to this new format. /etc/locale.conf contains a new-line separated list of variable assignments. The variables we support are LANG as well as the LC_* variables (with the exception of LC_ALL). The format is shared with systemd.

Eric Bélanger wrote:

The hostname utility was removed in net-tools 1.60.20110819cvs-1. The inetutils package, which was recently moved into the base group, will provide hostname from now on. Please make sure to install inetutils especially if you have problems with network utilities.