[arch-general] Shouldn't pacman restart dovecot after update?

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:59:10 +0100
schrieb Mario Figueiredo <marfig at 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