The state of official Arch repo

General Discussion
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I am using a 4.1 Arch Linux template for some time now that I build according to the qubes-builder documentation (okay, some quirky stuff happened and I needed to try multiple times, but hey, it worked eventually).

It was only these days that I understood that there is a arch repo for qubes-related packages at https://archlinux.qubes-os.org/ I think this is the key to only have to build an Archlinux template once and be happy for a long time (in the end it is a rolling-release).

It might be a bit easier to fix and update an repo for all the qubes-related tools than to regularly update official arch templates. So while I totally see the reason for not having an official Arch template at this time, I’d be happy to see a well-maintained Arch repo at least and I am willing to do something for this…

So my question is mainly: who is responsible for the qubes Arch repo at this moment? Or it is better to say: who is working on this right now, what would be a good place to discuss potential improvements, help testing packets etc. and what are the current plans regarding this repo and Arch in qubes in general?

2 Likes
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The repo forms part of the standard Qubes infrastructure, and is,
generally, updated as new packages are built, as other repositories.
That said, I wonder if the GitLab CI is not working - Arch doesn’t
feature in the GitLab summary, and there are build failures reported
which appear to minor transitory issues.

The best place to discuss improvements/issues would be GitHub.

The main issue at the moment is that the signing key is not available and
the repo is not automatically configured in templates. I raised issue
#6610 for both of these last year - until that issue is resolved the
official repo isn’t particularly useful, which is why I provide one.

You could test packages by enabling the testing repository, to catch them
before they migrate to current.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
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Thank you, I think I’ve seen your issues, but I felt like that can’t be all :sweat_smile: okay then, in this case I’ll try to emphasize some need and desire there to get some things done and we’ll see where this leads to :upside_down_face: