Hello Aron, On 06/11/15, Aron Widforss wrote:

Hi,

I'm going out for a four month hike next spring, and will not bring my loved XPS with me. It struck me yesterday that being offline for four months is something pacman and yaourt might not like. How do these programs handle long-term stasis, will things break horribly when I come back and run an update? Is there anything I can do to avoid it?

Probably the best thing is to read the news in reverse when you are back. Pacman in general had some issues but I haven't seen something big in last months - in my opinion it's rare occations where long inactivity breaks the system. Having said that though if you notice something "smelly" on the news I'd suggest to use something like Archlinux Archive [1]. Although not officially supported there are some nice features with agetpkg [2] like "Restoring to a specific date" [3]. Note: The agetpkg has been the subject of a discussion in dev list for inlcuding it as a package or being in AUR. Hopefully by the time you are going this would be resolved. Discalimer: I've never used it and the most I've been inactive is about a month which pacman was able to work with. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Archive [2]: https://github.com/seblu/agetpkg [3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Archive#How_to_restore_all_m... -- Leonidas Spyropoulos Compiled in Vim, sent through mutt.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Aron Widforss <aron@antarkt.is> wrote:

Hi,

I'm going out for a four month hike next spring, and will not bring my loved XPS with me. It struck me yesterday that being offline for four months is something pacman and yaourt might not like. How do these programs handle long-term stasis, will things break horribly when I come back and run an update? Is there anything I can do to avoid it?

For that period of time, I'd do one of two things. If I had a proper system backup, I'd just update when I came back, and hope everything works (best case assumption). This doesn't take much time unless you're on a really slow connection. If I didn't have that (or the space for that) I'd just do updates using the archive a week (at most) at a time. Simulate weekly updates, basically. Should be really safe. Oh, and have a great time!

Op 6 nov. 2015 09:25 schreef "Aron Widforss" <aron@antarkt.is>:

Hi,

I'm going out for a four month hike next spring, and will not bring my loved XPS with me. It struck me yesterday that being offline for four months is something pacman and yaourt might not like. How do these programs handle long-term stasis, will things break horribly when I come back and run an update? Is there anything I can do to avoid it?

As others noted: make sure your data is backed up safely. Besides that: check the arch news before updating and you should be ok. I've had exactly the same situation with a special system, but even after 6 months or so, the update went very smooth. Pacman is really a killer app here ;). Mvg, Guus