Arch Linux Developers about the transfer of the packaging scheme from the xz algorithm (.pkg.tar.xz) to (.pkg.tar.zst). Rebuilding packages to zstd format resulted in a total increase in package size by 0.8%, but provided a 1300% faster decompression. As a consequence, switching to zstd will lead to a noticeable increase in the speed of installing packages. Currently, 545 packages have already been compressed in the repository using the zstd algorithm, the rest of the packages will be transferred to zstd as updates are generated for them.
Packages in .pkg.tar.zst format are built automatically when using devtools 20191227 and newer releases of this toolkit. For users, the transition to a new format does not require manual manipulations if the pacman package manager was updated in a timely manner last year () and libarchive (3.3.3-1, released back in 2018). For those who happen to have an unupdated release of libarchive, the new version can be installed from
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Source: opennet.ru