A new XBPS stable version has been released: 0.37. This is a major release that supports per-root overridable repo and virtualpkg configuration files (among other things).

Release notes:

• Enabled syslog logging by default, may be still disabled via xbps.conf.

• Added support for system and configuration virtualpkg directories.

  The system virtualpkg directory set to <rootdir>/usr/share/xbps/virtualpkg.d contains virtualpkg configuration files (.conf/.vpkg) that can be overrided by the admin in <rootdir>/etc/xbps/virtualpkg.d bearing the same file name.

  This obsoletes the “virtualpkgdir” keyword support from the xbps configuration file.

• Added support for system and configuration repository directories, as explained in GH #39.

  The system repository directory set to <rootdir>/usr/share/xbps/repo.d contains repository configuration files (.conf) that can be overrided by the admin in <rootdir>/etc/xbps/repo.d bearing the same file name.

• xbps-create(8): new option -t, --tags to specify a list of tags (categories) the package should be part of. This is just for metadata purposes and querying packages by tags in the future.

• xbps-install(8): it’s possible now to update a single package (if it’s already installed) without using the -u, –update option. This implements GH #35.

  $ xbps-install [-f] -y foo

  • if foo is installed, update it.
  • if foo not installed, install it.
  • if -f is set, reinstall or downgrade it.

• xbps-query(8): new option (-S, –show) which shows info of a package installed locally or in a repository with -R. This is the default mode if no other mode is set; to preserve compatibility with previous versions.

• xbps-query(8): new long option “–regex” that can be used in the “ownedby (-o, –ownedby)” and “search (-s, –search)” modes to match Extended Regular Expressions against package properties.

  This allows you to find packages by matching EREs in package properties, for example to find out what packages were built between 2014-05-23 and 2014-05-25:

  $ xbps-query --regex -s 2014-05-2[35] -p build-date

• Imported portable proplib 0.6.4 from portableproplib.

• Fixed a new issue with virtual packages, if a pkg provides a virtual package that is already installed but with lesser version, do not update to it unnecessarily (in some cases results in a crash).

• A new object is now recorded in the pkgdb to see the origin repository of which a package was installed from, i.e:

  $ xbps-query --property=repository-origin pkg

• xbps-remove(8): the -n,–dry-run option does not acquire the pkgdb file lock anymore, so that any user can use this mode even without write permission to the target pkgdb.

• xbps-remove(8): -O, –clean-cache is now multithreaded. Gives a performance boost as the number of threads increases.

• xbps.conf: the keyword “include” now supports file globbing, so that multiple small configuration files can be included directly, i.e:

  include=/etc/xbps/repo.d/*.conf

Contributed by Enno Boland.

• xbps-query(8): fixed a segfault with ‘-Rf’ if pkg is in the repository data and its binary package does not exist.

Please report issues at https://github.com/voidlinux/xbps/issues