As is becoming tradition, I need to make a blog post to accompany a pacman release! This is a big release with a long awaited feature so it needed a major version bump (and, most importantly, we now are back ahead of the Linux kernel in version numbers). I have reclaimed the title as most prolific committer, but that just means Andrew had more patches to point out mistakes in… Here are the top 10 committers:

$ git shortlog -n -s v4.2.0..v5.0.0
   176  Allan McRae
    85  Andrew Gregory
    16  Florian Pritz
     9  Dave Reisner
     9  Johannes Löthberg
     9  Rikard Falkeborn
     7  Pierre Neidhardt
     5  David Macek
     5  Evangelos Foutras
     4  Mohammad Alsaleh

As always, more regular contributors would be helpful. Just have a talk to us first before running ahead implementing a new feature (it is not nice to have to reject a patchset that obviously took a lot of work because it is already being handled in a different way…).

On to the more important stuff… What is new this release?

Hooks: This has been one of the most requested features for a long time, and Andrew gets all the credit for the implementation. So, what exactly are hooks? Hooks are scripts that are run at the beginning and end of a transaction. They can be triggered by either a file or a package name. This will allow us to (e.g.) update the desktop MIME type cache at the end of a transaction (if needed) and only do it one rather than after every package. Andrew has a git repo with some examples. Lets look at the desktop MIME cache one:

[Trigger]
Type = File
Operation = Install
Operation = Upgrade
Operation = Remove
Target = usr/share/applications/*.desktop
 
[Action]
When = PostTransaction
Exec = /bin/update-desktop-database --quiet

It should be fairly obvious what that does… See the alpm-hooks(5) man page for more information on the hook format.

Files database operations: pacman can now search repository file lists like pkgfile, but slower and probably less flexible. Sort of like Falcon to Captain America… still a super-hero! File bug reports for improvement requests. A separate files database is used so everyday package operations do not require downloading a much larger database. After updating the database (with “pacman -Fy“, you can do things like:

$ pacman -Fo /usr/bin/pacman
usr/bin/pacman is owned by core/pacman 4.2.1-4
 
$ pacman -Fl pacman
pacman etc/
pacman etc/makepkg.conf
pacman etc/pacman.conf
...
 
$ pacman -Fs libalpm.so
core/pacman 4.2.1-4
    usr/lib/libalpm.so
 
$ pacman -Fsx kcm.*print.*\.so
extra/print-manager 15.12.1-1
    usr/lib/qt/plugins/kcm_printer_manager.so
community/kmymoney 4.7.2-3
    usr/lib/kde4/kcm_kmm_printcheck.so

libmakepkg: makepkg in the pacman-4.2 release was a 3838 line shell script. A bit daunting, hard to test and not reusable… I have started the process of splitting this into a library containing scripts that are a more reasonable size. makepkg is still 2395 lines, so a lot of work remains (help!). One outcome of this splitting is we can drop in extra checks into the PKGBUILD and package checking steps, and even extra passes to (e.g.) optimize svg files. I have started rewriting namcap using this feature (see my github repo). This also provides tools for extracting variables from PKGBUILDs without sourcing the PKGBUILD itself, which does require ensuring that variables that should be arrays are actually arrays and those that are not are not.

There were a bunch of other small changes throughout the code base. Check out the NEWS file for more details.