[arch-general] signoff kernel26-2.6.24.3-6

[sepht ml]

I know I am perhaps a bit late to this thread and perhaps don't belong
here but I'd like to weigh in.
Here's some history if anyone cares: I've been an Arch user since 0.6
and spent 6-8 months in 2004/2005 being probably the most active
person in #archlinux when I helped more new users than I can count.
I've since been preoccupied by my studies but I continue to use Arch
whenever I can and keep it as my go-to distro for things ranging from
small installs to desktop systems I intend to heavily use. I like
Ubuntu, I like Fedora, I like Slackware, I used to like Gentoo and I
keep up with their releases and try all of them, but Arch is my hands
down favorite. I moved to Arch because it was such a clean
distrobution which you could always figure out and keep track of, and
thats why I've kept up with it. If anything, I'm the user you might
not be hearing from.

I think the best example I've seen of the "Arch Way" is the refusal of
making pacman run lilo after it had installed a new kernel. Arch
expects the user to understand their system, understand what they
need, and be very clear and simple in what it does. I'd like pacman to
give me output when it updates a package whose path, config syntax or
whatever changed so I can be responsible for fixing it. I don't want
the installer to be making groups for me, I don't want the package
manager to be changing any more than it really needs to. As for bug
fixes, in my opinion, I feel its up to the pacackage mainters,
sometimes things just come up that need fixing and can't be bothered
with waiting for upstream.
However, Arch should stay out of the way enough that I can submit a
bug report to a project and KNOW exactly what I may have that might
effect the apps behavior because I installed or changed something to
run  significantly different from upstream.

I agree with most of the old timers here, if you guys want a distro
that holds your hand through everything and tells you everything, then
perhaps Arch isn't for you, the Frugalware guys are nice though! Arch
has always expected their users to be *smart* and have a solid
understanding of their system and their setup and leave running the
system up to the user. Thats what gentoo used to be in 2003/2004; when
it became swamped with new users who turned it into the automated and
out-of-control distro it is today, I  (and many others) promptly
dropped it and went back to Slack. Please, don't send Arch into the
hole of being a distro so automated it escapes the control of the user
from the start
 and never relenquishes it.

Thank you,
sepht

P.S. Sorry for the formatting, I dunno what Opera+gmail are up to...