On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:56:11 -0500 Dwight Schauer <dschauer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. > > 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. I think you need better Sys-Admin skills than I have but that isn't arch's fault. > > 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. I'm not saying is the Arch developers fault, just that it keep on happening. I've had the odd 'blond-moments' that were suprisingly easy to fix and been bitten by updates to libraries that have been released before all apps that needed the superceeded version had been fixed. I also got caught out when xfce4.8 came out and the mirror I was using hadn't got all of the updated packages available. > > Ok, the updated networking setup broke some of my systems earlier this > year, but it was easy enough to fix. The only problem I had with that was messages flashing by to fast to read and not making it into the logs so I could do something about them. > > 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. Ubuntu dumbs everything down then gets in the way when you need to use setting beyond the basic. I was using Debian for a while, until they bound selinux in, after which I couldn't get any custom kernel to boot and the default kernel was too slow and missing h/w support I needed. > > 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. > -- mick <bareman@xxxxxxxxxx>
