Valve has announced a new collaboration with the Arch Linux distribution. The company revealed it will provide financial backing for two crucial Arch Linux initiatives— a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.
This collaboration will take off some old pains for Arch Linux. The volunteer developers work on projects in their free time. However, some tasks require an amount of time investment that volunteers alone couldn’t reasonably achieve. Valve’s backing will allow that focused work to be done through freelance contracts, accelerating progress.
Of these, the main one would be setting up a strong build service. This would automate building and packaging software from source for Arch Linux. It would save volunteers from mundane or repetitive tasks so they could contribute to more creative work, such as making actual software or packaging.
Furthermore, it would be more reliable because it catches errors and makes sure all the software builds cleanly. That is one of those projects that have been talked about for a very long time but never really had dedicated resources.
The other initiative is a secure signing enclave. This involves setting up an environment solely for cryptographically signing packages before release. Signatures ensure that downloads have not been tampered with and are coming from a source that is trusted. A segregated signing system will move the process away from regular development to increase security.
