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> In the long-term, the funding touted should, at minimum, allow Arch Linux to improve the security of its distribution and provide more structured releases com

> In the long-term, the funding touted should, at minimum, allow Arch Linux to improve the security of its distribution and provide more structured releases compared to its current near-continuous update cycle. This is a weird point, and concerning if it is true, because it seems to assume Arch's rolling release model is a bad model that the Arch team are forced into due to lack of funds, whereas for most of us it is in fact one of the main reasons to use Arch. As another commenter mentioned, the rolling release model is one of the reasons why Valve chose Arch, so hopefully this comment in the article is just misinformed. But there is a concern IMO that once Arch starts to look how Valve want it to look, they will try and influence the project to move to a more Debian-like release model (so that they have to worry less about breaking changes). Of course whether they can successfully influence the project in that way is another thing.

westpfelia 2y ago
I thought one of the big things Valve wants to implement is a more sound CI/CD pipeline. And I assume at some point maybe have some sort of more unified app (store). I know people love AUR. But one thing that plagues linux is the flatpak/snap/app-get/dnf/aur dance. Getting something more unified (at least for 'casuals') would be good.
Foxboron 2y ago
> This is a weird point, and concerning if it is true, because it seems to assume Arch's rolling release model is a bad model that the Arch team are forced into due to lack of funds, whereas for most of us it is in fact one of the main reasons to use Arch. This is reading too much into it. The issue is that things like proper build infrastructure and signing enclaves is hard work that is not easy to work out and provide on a volunteer basis. We (Arch) do not support multiple architectures for the simple reason that it would imply I'd need to watch N number of builds of one package pr architecture. This is what we did for the 32bit version and 64bit version. That's a lot of wasted time, and doesn't help you sell architecture support. Signing enclave is hard to do right as it requires the technical know-how to do securely and the supported tooling to move the package signing from a pr developer basis to a central signing key. In the long run this would also enable Arch to support Secure Boot.
Sakos 2y ago
It's not in what the Arch maintainers said. The improvements are more around improving their build pipeline and allowing things like simultaneous x86 V3 and v4 releases (from the comments I've seen). This isn't about moving away from rolling releases afaik.

westpfelia 2y ago

I thought one of the big things Valve wants to implement is a more sound CI/CD pipeline. And I assume at some point maybe have some sort of more unified app (store). I know people love AUR. But one thing that plagues linux is the flatpak/snap/app-get/dnf/aur dance. Getting something more unified (at least for 'casuals') would be good.

Foxboron 2y ago

> This is a weird point, and concerning if it is true, because it seems to assume Arch's rolling release model is a bad model that the Arch team are forced into due to lack of funds, whereas for most of us it is in fact one of the main reasons to use Arch. This is reading too much into it. The issue is that things like proper build infrastructure and signing enclaves is hard work that is not easy to work out and provide on a volunteer basis. We (Arch) do not support multiple architectures for the simple reason that it would imply I'd need to watch N number of builds of one package pr architecture. This is what we did for the 32bit version and 64bit version. That's a lot of wasted time, and doesn't help you sell architecture support. Signing enclave is hard to do right as it requires the technical know-how to do securely and the supported tooling to move the package signing from a pr developer basis to a central signing key. In the long run this would also enable Arch to support Secure Boot.

Sakos 2y ago

It's not in what the Arch maintainers said. The improvements are more around improving their build pipeline and allowing things like simultaneous x86 V3 and v4 releases (from the comments I've seen). This isn't about moving away from rolling releases afaik.