On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Mick wrote: > I did make a mistake when I chose Arch. I asked friends on yahoo chat > for suggestions for a replacement my then distro when it focused on > eye-candy to the detriment of function and several suggested Arch. It > was only when the problems I raised here struck the first time that I > found Arch made no pretensions to being fit for production. By that > time I had come to like most of what Arch is. I run Arch on production systems. Yikes you might think. However, I run Arch Linux on more than 10 systems, and about 6 or 7 of those are at work. I've been running Arch since 2007 and used it for several months at home before using it at work. I update non-critical systems first, but since I update them daily, any breakage is easy to fix, and usually I've gotten a heads up as I track arch-general, arch-announce, arch-releng, and arch-dev-public. I have cron set to automatically download all updates so when I get around to updating, it is fast. The installs I've set up for others they typcially never update, but when I get back with them to help them on something (might even be a few months) I go ahead and update and while the update is taking place I open another terminal and pre-fix any issues. I've not had downtime with Arch, and it is a breeze to update compared to Gentoo, which I ran for a many years before I found Arch. And yes, I'll even update while working on a critical job related issue with a co-worker. I run a very custom installer, and use it to create cookie cutter installs that I already have everything set up the way we need to for our work environment, but of course adding a needing tool or two later is fairly easy. I've not had much success with the official provided installers, I think my pre partitioning and other choices mess it up. I had to fix the boot loader on my first few installs of Arch so I ended up just installing arch gentoo style on subsequent systems. I don't install base anymore, it has several packages I never use. Since the provided installer has only worked for me maybe once or twice, I just use my custom installer, which is much easier anyways for me, as I just change the hostname and default username/pass, change the architecture if need be, and do a make all. I try out he installs first in qemu-kvm for a quick sanity check, then transfer the filesystem images to the target system. Using a custom installer is fast, as I use the cached packages on my host. I have a custom xfce4 desktop setup in /etc/skel, so the install is ready to use. I've run Debian and Ubuntu but fought with package management and custom kernel deployment too much on them so I found Arch much easier to manage. Arch is much simpler than those and so much easier for me to wrap my head around it and fix issues. When I do have a question about something a quick email here about it and it is answered quickly. Most of the time there is no need to ask. All the relevant issues are already being discussed here or in arch-dev-public. All that being said, Arch is certainly not for everyone. But I disagree about it not being production worthy. I have the lts kernel installed on every system, but only the most critical ones use it by default. For any system to be production worthy, you have to be able to maintain it and fix any issues fast that come up. The only real mess up I've had was my fault, not a damaging update from an Arch developer. I mistakenly put an x86_64 bit repo path at the top of the mirrorlists of two i686 boxes and updated them. Yikes. I've since switched to using $arch in the mirrorlists rather than hardcoding the architecture. They were not out of commission long, a boot of the livecd, a quick $(awking) of /var/log/pacman.log in a pacman command line reinstalled the invalid packages and I had working systems back. Ok, the updated networking setup broke some of my systems earlier this year, but it was easy enough to fix. Arch is easy to manage if you insist on having the system set up the way you want it and you want to be on top of every issue. Distros like OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and to a lesser extent Debian are too daunting and confusing to me. Most Linux users I know would not tolerate Arch Linux if they had to install and setup it up themselves. But at the same time I have no real like for the distros they prefer to install and manage for themselves. A rolling update based distro that is mostly minimal and lightweight is not without it's issues and problems. All distros have serious issues and problems, it is mainly a matter of which have the issues/problems that are easiest for you to manage. I may not be the typical Arch user, dunno. Especially since I use joe instead if vi, and was a not amused when joe went to the AUR. But I have a repo for work stuff, so I just put it there so it is ready on new systems. You may have made a mistake when you chose Arch, and I'm not going to disagree with on your reasoning. Arch does have major/serious issues if you don't want to stay on top of things. And being a rolling update distro, you need to stay on top of changes. If you think Arch is bad though as far as damaging updates, you should maybe spend some time to spend some time with Gentoo or Sabayon. One thing though, I use yaourt, so I notice every time a package gets dropped of the main repos and ends up in the aur. Most of the time that is an indication to me that I know longer need that package. So yeah, if you use packages that get orphaned, they might eventually stop working if you had them installed, and one would might blame an update for killing those packages.
