Allan McRae wrote:
With every big rebuilds we get new breakage stories. It seems like it's the norm nowadays rather than the exception.
I am wondering if it's really only the users that are to blame.. or if Arch is also to blame. Or if Arch was supposed to be an elitist distribution and is victim of its success.
I think the answer to that is in the question: What did we do different previously that resulted in far less of these issues?
My impression is that nothing has particularly change in terms of how rebuilds are handled. If anything, the whole process has become a lot more streamlined and cases of missing a package rebuild are now almost non-existent.
So the cause must be... A change in user-base? Maybe just an increase in user-base resulting in more people who think Arch should be done their way and not the Arch way?
Well, I think this viewpoint is too elitist... I am not sure that you should blame users who just read http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#LCD_filter_patched_pa... and who don't even know that cairo is a dependency of gtk2. (Come on, do you know well every installed library on your system?) And with broken cairo the user just gets "fav_gtk_app: error while loading shared libraries...", so it requires a little bit sophisticated bug-hunting. I just mention the "-Sy system_breaker_package" issue again, where sodepends or libpng14 could help. I know that these system breakages require some user fault too, but I think the main purpose of pacman (should be) to not allow break our system. If I accepted your standpoint as a solution, I would suggest to not use %CONFLICTS% array or versioned dependencies ;-) (Because "elite" users should know that foo conflicts with bar, and all his packages [dependencies] should be always up-to-date...) Bye