core-updates, wip-armhf, and 0.8.1

core-updates, wip-armhf, and 0.8.1

[Ludovic Courtès]

I’d like to merge core-updates to master Real Soon Now.  The last
missing bit for me is the Libtool upgrade, which shouldn’t be too hard
(surprisingly, Libtool has a number of test failures on MIPS:
<http://hydra.gnu.org/build/181662/nixlog/2/raw>; I’m tempted to disable
tests on MIPS altogether.)

The question is whether we should merge wip-armhf in core-updates
before.  I think it may be more reasonable to postpone that.  Mark?

Then I would like to make a primarily-bug-fix release, probably 0.8.1.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.

core-updates merged!

[Ludovic Courtès]

I’ve just merged core-updates in ‘master’, yay!

As a reminder, some of the cool things for packagers:

  • ‘search-path-specification’ can now specify files (instead of plain
    directories) or even file pattern (for example, ‘catalog.xml’ for
    libxml2, or maybe ‘\\.cmake$’ for CMake)  This should unlock a few
    things.

  • The ld wrapper now adds a ‘-rpath’ flag for libraries passed by file
    name (as in “/path/to/libfoo.so” instead of “-L/path/to -lfoo”.)
    This will be useful for CMake-generated makefiles, notably.

  • ‘libltdl’ and ‘libtool’ are now separate.

For users:

  • Documentation is now systematically in share/{man,info}, and it is
    compressed.

  • The ‘glibc’ package no longer has a “locale” output, making it
    faster to build, and much smaller (the “locale” output was always
    pulled, and it took 110 MiB.)

  • A bunch of updates, notably GCC 4.8.4, Binutils 2.25,
    xorg-server 1.16.3.

Enjoy!

Ludo’.