I’m sure this answer must be somewhere on the forum or wiki but I can’t find it.
Where do I find the changes incorporated into a manjaro package over the original arch package? For example kwin 6.6.4-1 was just updated to kwin 6.6.4-1.0 and packaged by Phil. I’d like to compare them or have a changelog in order to learn.
I’ve looked on gitlab (Packages · GitLab) but it doesn’t show.
Beyond my ken to be honest.
Manjaro often rebuilds or modifies stuff for stability/branding or whatever.
So step 1 is to check sources; Arch from PKGBUILD in the Arch GIT repo, then Manjaro in GitLab sometimes with patches or whatever…
pacman -Si kwin
Repository : extra
Name : kwin
Version : 6.6.4-1.0
Description : An easy to use, but flexible, Wayland compositor
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
Licenses : LGPL-2.0-or-later
Groups : plasma
Provides : None
Depends On : aurorae breeze gcc-libs glibc iio-sensor-proxy plasma-activities kauth kcmutils kcolorscheme kconfig kcoreaddons kcrash kdbusaddons kdeclarative kdecoration kglobalaccel kglobalacceld kguiaddons ki18n kidletime kirigami kitemmodels knewstuff knighttime knotifications kpackage kquickcharts kscreenlocker kservice ksvg kwayland kwidgetsaddons kwindowsystem kxmlgui lcms2 libcanberra libdisplay-info libdrm libei libepoxy libevdev libinput libpipewire libqaccessibilityclient-qt6 libxcb libxcvt libxkbcommon mesa milou pipewire-session-manager libplasma qt6-5compat qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-svg qt6-tools systemd-libs wayland xcb-util-keysyms xcb-util-wm
Optional Deps : plasma-keyboard: virtual keyboard
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Download Size : 11.93 MiB
Installed Size : 30.46 MiB
Packager : Philip Mueller <philm@manjaro.org>
Build Date : Sun 03 May 2026 13:31:16 +07
Validated By : MD5 Sum SHA-256 Sum Signature
That extra -0 means it’s a Manjaro rebuild.
Phil did say that packages were being rebuilt for the upcoming Bian-May release cycle, aligning kernels, Plasma, and drivers .
That basically means the difference between 6.6.4-1 and 6.6.4-1.0 is packaging-level only—not functional changes in KWin itself.
Please, anyone, correct me if I’m wrong.
Does that also explain why it doesn’t appear in gitlab? I would have assumed everything touched by Manjaro would be there, including repackages that haven’t been modified yet.
Also does Manjaro provide changelogs or diffs for the changes it does when modifying and repackaging? That’s what I’m really after.
[Stable Update] 2026-05-02 - #14 by philm
Should be fixed with our overlay package of kwin, which pulls in all 6.6.x fixes from upstream. Please report back if it got solved for you.
@philm exist a public pkgbuild of kwin 6.6.4-1.0 ?
Nice, but I should be able to get this somewhere without having to search the forum. Within the package itself or in the metadata (but I imagine that is limited and often not enough space) would be ideal.
The “upstream fixes” are probably documented at Plasma / KWin · GitLab
Phil released a similar update recently for botan 3.11.0-1.0 to include a SSE2 patch
Package has now been replaced by botan 3.11.1-1 inherited from Arch
Yes, but which upstream fixes has Phil added, and were there any other changes? As far as I can tell that isn’t documented anywhere, and it would be easier to include it in some context within the package than every person that wants to know having to find the original arch package and running a diff on the two.
I’m not just talking about this package either, I used it as an example because it was the last one I noticed. I’m more interested in the workflow of repackaging, and for debugging purposes one needs to know exactly what a package includes, including patches or distro specific modifications.
That’s disappointing, and if I were running this distro on anything other than my own PC it would be quite the red flag for security and transparency.
Gitlab is definitely one of the things that need restructuring and optimizing, when “better times” come. I find it pretty chaotic and lacking stuff like changelogs etc. As you say, not everybody wants to do a diff…and should not need to.
Changes should be clearly documented. But this means extra time, so for the time being when developers time is a scarce resource i can understand why not everything is documented. But in the future this should be changed.
A git diff should be enough in most cases and an actual written changelog is unnecessary.
The PKGBUILD is hosted somewhere and someone changed the pkgver (or pkgrel?). This change is nowhere to be found.
The latter - pkgver is the version of the software (so 6.6.4), pkgrel is the version of the package.
I can’t find anything more about this on Manjaro’s public Gitlab or GitHub, so this package must be from a different source to the regular maintained packages.
I agree this is not good for transparency, but not security.
The patched package has been released to all branches, but you could downgrade to the Arch version 6.6.4-1
I really only mentioned this package as an example of a potentially larger problem.
kwin 6.6.5-1 has now been released to unstable and testing branches
$ mbn info kwin -q
Branch : archlinux
Name : kwin
Version : 6.6.5-1
Repository : extra
Build Date : Tue 12 May 2026 21:10:52
Packager : Antonio Rojas <arojas@archlinux.org>
Branch : unstable
Name : kwin
Version : 6.6.5-1
Repository : extra
Build Date : Tue 12 May 2026 21:10:52
Packager : Antonio Rojas <arojas@archlinux.org>
Branch : testing
Name : kwin
Version : 6.6.5-1
Repository : extra
Build Date : Tue 12 May 2026 21:10:52
Packager : Antonio Rojas <arojas@archlinux.org>
Branch : stable
Name : kwin
Version : 6.6.4-1.0
Repository : extra
Build Date : Sun 03 May 2026 07:31:16
Packager : Philip Mueller <philm@manjaro.org>