On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:56:11 -0500 Dwight Schauer <dschauer@gmail.com> 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@tpg.com.au>