Am Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:59:10 +0100 schrieb Mario Figueiredo <marfig@gmail.com>:
An argument can be made that this approach makes a rolling release less attractive to users who have invested heavily in the supported repositories. I heard this much just recently from a former Arch user; The possibility of an an unpdate resulting in a post-update maintenance nightmare to get the machine up and running again can be a little scary.
I hadn't had any post-update maintenance nightmares yet. Well, not nightmares. I want to know what is done and what happens on my system. Otherwise I would recommend a different distro. But to be honest I had a lot more post-update nightmares with SuSE, because YaST has always overridden my configurations. This can't happen with Arch due to the .pacnew files. And I don't think `diff configfile configfile.pacnew` and an `/etc/rc.d/daemon restart` is such a nightmare. Arch is only scary if people don't want to learn Linux and read documentations. There are better distros for those people.
But I do agree with you. I just don't think that waving the KISS principle as a weapon achieves much. It's a tool. And it has its disadvantages. Users must be aware of them.
But with KISS you have the most control over your system. Well, there can be a few exceptions if they make sense. But this is not the case for daemon restarting.
If a user keeps the machine updated regularly and follows a tight upgrade schedule, they will have to deal with only minor incidents once and a while. And all easy to handle. Stop daemon, start daemon. On the other hand, if a user decides to update their machine once every two months, they must understand that it is not the rolling release system that is at fault. It's them for not understanding what's the point of a rolling release.
I totally agree. Heiko