We have been slowly working towards the next pacman release. The major change for this release is the implementation of parallel downloads. Check out this video:
It is time for this feature to receive some wider testing. Grab the package using:
pacman -U http://allanmcrae.com/packages/pacman-6.0.0alpha1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
This should be “safe” – there are quite a number of us using this code for our system management. There may be issues with AUR helpers due to ABI changes… If you are concerned, keep a copy of the repo package around to reinstall if necessary.
There are still a few issues with the downloader we will fix before release. If one of your mirrors is broken, you will be spammed with error messages at the end of the downloads. And TotalDownload does not work. But otherwise, it is good to go!
Report any bugs to the bug tracker.
Nice Work.
Thanks alot for the continued development.
Oh great!
This will be a very good add to pacman and fastest updates
Thanks!
this is an awesome improvement, thank you for doing this!
now I only wish that the color setting was used with the verbosepkglists to make it more clear the differences of versions, eg by changing color of the part of the version that changed, like, from 1.1.5 to 1.3.1 then 3.1 would be a different color.
something like outputs from yarn outdated: https://imgur.com/a/ezKfumh
that would make it super easy to see differences in upgrades π
Nice to have but there may be more critical feature to focus on to prepare for this major release
Great job! π
Parallel downloading is a significant improvement.
Thank you for your work! This looks like an excellent improvement.
Amazing, looking forward to testing it when it is available in the Testing repository
Pacman 6.0 has reached alpha today in marking the point the Arch Linux developers are seeking more widespread testing.
Looking good! Just downloaded it and tested it by running a system upgrade. Looks like total downloads is working. Parallel downloads was a much needed improvement on my home network, and also watching the little bars go at the same time is extremely satisfying. Great work!
Looks nice, thanks for the goodies.
It would be great to add a flag to cap bandwidth used by Pacman.
Not working here, unfortunately. I mean, pacman “works”, but there’s no parallel downloading, I’ve tried twice now.
So yeah, I’ve ran 3 updates with about 15 downloads or more each, and not once have they downloaded in parallel.
Have you set “ParallelDownloads = 5” in pacman.conf?
Lord have mercy, why isn’t that in the blog post lol
I tried to look and see if there were any configuration options I needed to add, but there’s nothing here mentioning anything (blog post just says “install and test it out”, and none of the other coverage I’ve seen says anything about it either. man pacman doesn’t have it either. But yeah, after adding “ParallelDownloads = 5” to /etc/pacman.conf, it works wonderfully. I’m so hyped for this change, great work.
You would have got an /etc/pacman.conf.pacnew
Oh nice. This looks like Pacman is on the next level π
Thank you for your work!
love this.. i think this puts arch’s pacman at next level.
great job. I think there should be a flag to switch back to single threaded mode too
if you want single thread mode you can set ParallelDownloads = 1 i guess