[arch-general] Ignoring packages and piecemeal updates
Hi archers, It has been repeated a lot of times that doing piecemeal updates with pacman -Sy pkgname is not a very good idea. What about ignoring packages? Is it as dangerous? And a more general question: is it even theoretically possible to have a bleeding edge distro with piecemeal updates and with no required manual intervention during updates or is it just a pipe dream? Best, Denis.
On 03/17/10 14:42, Denis Kobozev wrote:
Hi archers,
It has been repeated a lot of times that doing piecemeal updates with pacman -Sy pkgname is not a very good idea. What about ignoring packages? Is it as dangerous?
the most likely danger with small version skews is if a library is upgraded, and a program depends on that library, and the library's new version is not binary-compatible with the library's old version.
And a more general question: is it even theoretically possible to have a bleeding edge distro with piecemeal updates and with no required manual intervention during updates or is it just a pipe dream?
Gentoo does some, (use revdep-rebuild. hope it works.).* NixOS does better (at least at the theoretical stuff, though it has fewer users..it was born in academia..Basically it is archtected so that you can have multiple versions of any package installed and they inherently won't conflict with each other.). *side-note: gentoo doesn't have bleeding-edge packages as often as it used to. but none are perfect. Large version skews tend to make everything somewhat incompatible at runtime. -Isaac
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Isaac Dupree <ml@isaac.cedarswampstudios.org> wrote:
NixOS does better (at least at the theoretical stuff, though it has fewer users..it was born in academia..Basically it is archtected so that you can have multiple versions of any package installed and they inherently won't conflict with each other.).
Interesting. Judging from a quick glance at the NixOS homepage, nix deals with shared dependencies by having very precise rules about which package requires which versions of shared libraries. So when a new version of libfoo comes out, all packages that depend on libfoo should be rebuilt. If package maintainers are lazy, you would end up with a system where each package has its own version of libfoo... Best, Denis.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Denis Kobozev <d.v.kobozev@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Isaac Dupree <ml@isaac.cedarswampstudios.org> wrote:
NixOS does better (at least at the theoretical stuff, though it has fewer users..it was born in academia..Basically it is archtected so that you can have multiple versions of any package installed and they inherently won't conflict with each other.).
Interesting. Judging from a quick glance at the NixOS homepage, nix deals with shared dependencies by having very precise rules about which package requires which versions of shared libraries. So when a new version of libfoo comes out, all packages that depend on libfoo should be rebuilt. If package maintainers are lazy, you would end up with a system where each package has its own version of libfoo...
GoboLinux does something similar in that packages are installed to some place in a directory named packagename-version/ and then things are symlinked in.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Denis Kobozev <d.v.kobozev@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting. Judging from a quick glance at the NixOS homepage, nix deals with shared dependencies by having very precise rules about which package requires which versions of shared libraries. So when a new version of libfoo comes out, all packages that depend on libfoo should be rebuilt. If package maintainers are lazy, you would end up with a system where each package has its own version of libfoo...
GoboLinux does something similar in that packages are installed to some place in a directory named packagename-version/ and then things are symlinked in.
And how does that work out in practice? Not that good, otherwise Arch would do it too? :) Best, Denis.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Denis Kobozev <d.v.kobozev@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi archers,
It has been repeated a lot of times that doing piecemeal updates with pacman -Sy pkgname is not a very good idea. What about ignoring packages? Is it as dangerous?
And a more general question: is it even theoretically possible to have a bleeding edge distro with piecemeal updates and with no required manual intervention during updates or is it just a pipe dream?
Just a pipe dream.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Denis Kobozev <d.v.kobozev@gmail.com> wrote:
And a more general question: is it even theoretically possible to have a bleeding edge distro with piecemeal updates and with no required manual intervention during updates or is it just a pipe dream?
Just a pipe dream.
I would actually say that it is possible with some rejiggering of pacman. Will Arch ever do it? No way - it's way too much added complexity that a human can deal with in much less time
participants (4)
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Aaron Griffin
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Denis Kobozev
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Isaac Dupree
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Xavier Chantry