Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future
This year marked 18 years since the first official release of Arch Linux. Now that the distribution has reached adulthood, it is a good time to reflect on its history, the decisions that have made it the distribution it is today, and what lessons we have learned along the way. We will conclude with a discussion of the future of the distribution, what we are currently working towards and the possibilities to come.
Allan McRae has been contributing to the pacman project since 2007 and is the current lead developer. He has implemented many features in makepkg and pacman including VCS packaging support, addressing sync database fragmentation, optional dependencies, disk space checking, package and database signing, and many others.
Levente Polyak joined the Arch Linux team in 2014 when he founded the Arch Security Team, which he continues to lead until today. During his journey he gave the initial push towards reproducible packaging. Today, his main focus is development and security from top to bottom. Levente was elected as Arch Linux Project Leader in 2020.