Comment by nonameiguess

I'd never heard of this until right now, but Jesus Christ, Hacker News, this is an awful lot of griping for a project that appears to be completely additive with zero impact to end users or administrators of Arch Linux. pacman is still around and still uses libalpm, not this. The FAQ and mission seem pretty clear that this exists, at least for now, solely for the benefit of packagers and maintainers. They decided making this as a modular set of specifications and libraries would be best to allow arbitrary downstreams to make use as they see fit, but the only current project using this, as far as I can tell, is a project that automates updates for package builds and possibly the Python bindings are either used by the AUR website or soon will be to extract and display package metadata.

I get the cynicism and griping when it's the latest in LLM slop, capitalist surveillance state, and corporate churn for the sake of churn, but where on Earth is the harm in this? They wanted some low-level utilities for reading, writing, and manipulating package files and metadata, for whatever reason found the existing libalpm lacking, so made this. It doesn't appear that any end-user Arch packages use it or depend upon it, you'll not need to install this or the larger Rust toolchain unless you independently decide you want to, but there's a bunch of complaining anyway.