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Road to pacman 3.2.0

Hadn’t posted on the old blog in a while, so I thought I’d give a quick update on my “little” baby project, pacman.

The road to 3.2.0 is coming along nicely, with the biggest set of changes being merged very early on- the switch to entirely dynamic allocation of memory in libalpm. This provided some HUGE benefits for pacman. I discussed the gory details of this in an earlier blog post.

Other things that are cool to see is Xavier’s and my continued work to clean up some of the codebase, with our most recent target being the server/download code in libalpm. This work is coming along nicely and should get merged to master soon. Some parts have already made it in.

We have also done some extensive work on “delta v2.0” for libalpm and the package and database scripts. This will address some of the shortcomings the previous implementation had. I want to make it clear that Nathan Jones did a tremendous job of getting this into libalpm in the first place- he did most of the hard work by writing the code from scratch, and we are simply trying to make some changes so it would be hard for a “certain distribution” not to use it.

There are several other one-off patches that have been incorporated as well. One of the cooler things we have now is a Chinese translation for pacman, with fully supported wide character output. This will actually find itself a home in 3.1.3, which should be coming relatively soon.

So is there a timeline for 3.2.0 release? Not really. Once the bigger patches start falling into place and we do some more testing, I might have a better idea, but a release in 2 months or so is quite plausible. Although there won’t be any huge user-visible changes, the dynamic memory allocation is a large enough change and improvement to warrant a release.

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