More than a year ago, Arch Linux He launched the last medium, not point, update of your package manager. Among its novelties we found some such as that the zstd algorithm was added which, compared to the "xz" algorithm, accelerated the compression and unpacking of packages, while preserving the level of compression. Looking to the future, it has entered the alpha phase Pac-man 6.0, the future major update that will introduce notable new features.
La alpha version Pacman 6.0 has been released a few hours ago, and details have been posted on this post from Allan McRae's blog. The most outstanding novelty has been designed thinking about saving time, as long as our internet connection is good and allows us to download large files in a short time.
Pacman 6.0 will save installation time
To be more specific, the most outstanding novelty of those that will arrive with Pacman 6.0 are the parallel downloads. As we have explained, by being able to download several packages at the same time, the installation time will be reduced, but only if our internet connection is capable of handling the general increase in the weight of the downloads well.
Users interested in testing the future version of the package manager can do so by opening the terminal and typing this command:
pacman -U http://allanmcrae.com/packages/pacman-6.0.0alpha1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
But it must be clear that we are talking about an alpha version and that problems are expected, so I would not recommend its installation on production equipment. In fact, McRae himself warns that there may be problems with AUR assistants for the changes introduced in ABI. There are also a few problems with the download manager, but all the bugs will be fixed before the stable version is released.
If you want to see the parallel downloads in action, you can see it in This Video that the developer has uploaded to Google Drive.