Happy new year facebook fans and Arch friends (friends of who? we don’t know, not us, not on facebook, not in the past and not in the future, but you must have friends amongst yourselves).
Some of you may have taken the previous post about abandoning Arch as a joke, since most of what we do recently is promote Obarun, an Arch based distribution with s6 and 66 init and service management. When we published that article we knew nothing of what Hyperbola was planning to do (we assume it was discussed within the community) or whether they were going to give-in to the pressure and incorporate arch’s pacman and packaging methodology change into their distribution. (Note: Hyperbola may be based on Arch but has its own separate repositories and rebuilds everything on their own to ensure everything is Free). All of their free packages, as far as we can tell are still compressed with xz. The bomb was set and it will go off soon (in open/free software tradition of timing kind of soon). Hyperbola is not just leaving Arch, it is leaving linux, for OpenBSD. But this is not about hyperbola, it is about Arch…. or skip to here if you are in a rush! Continue reading