Oxidizing the Arch Linux packaging infrastructure
2023-09-14, 12:15–12:55 (Europe/Berlin), Dome

Arch Linux has worked with its own packaging framework - Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM) - for about 20 years.

This talk is about an effort to rewrite low-level components and to create specifications for related metadata files using the Rust programming language.
It will cover new projects in the ALPM (https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/) group as well as several other related ones and give an outlook on future developments using the 🦀


Arch Linux (https://archlinux.org) has worked with its own packaging framework - Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM) - for about 20 years. The tooling consists mainly of scripts for package creation (e.g. makepkg, written in Bash) and a package manager (pacman, written in C).

Over the last years several projects for the improvement of the packaging and package distribution ecosystem have been started. Some of which had to reinvent the wheel.

This talk is about an effort to rewrite low-level components and to create specifications for related metadata files using the Rust programming language.
It will cover new projects in the ALPM (https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/alpm/) group as well as several other related ones and give an outlook on future developments using the 🦀

Slides: https://pkgbuild.com/~dvzrv/presentations/all-systems-go-2023/

I am a freelance software developer working mostly on open technologies.
As one of the Arch Linux developers I spend some of my free time packaging all sorts of software, as well as writing some of my own for the distribution.