[arch-general] on rolling release / reinstallation

[Robert Howard]

I've done the ill fated -Syu right before a project deadline. Something in
the update broke mdraid and my system wouldn't boot until I booted from
livecd to redo the -Syu. I think maybe my mirror was syncing when I was
updating and my packages were mismatched.

Never update when facing a deadline.

On Mar 16, 2010 8:10 PM, "Isaac Dupree" <ml at isaac.cedarswampstudios.org>
wrote:

On 03/16/10 14:12, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

> On 03/16/2010 01:58 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:
>
>> Welcome aboard and glad you're getting things sorted out. Once you
>> have used a rolling release distro, everything else just seems silly.
>> Reinstall every six months? No thanks!
>>
>
I enjoyed the 6-month reinstalls... for a while. They reminded me how my
system was set up ; to make backups ; etc.

 When I hear about issues people run into when upgrading to, say, the
> latest version of Ubuntu, my thinking is usually some combination of:
>
> 1) "What's an OS upgrade?"
>
> 2) "What's an OS version?"
>

true. and on the occasion that Ubuntu breaks something in a stable upgrade,
it's awful (although I'm not sure this ever actually happened to me).

I still reckon it's useful to reinstall Arch every few years, as "/" gets
cluttered with old layouts, .pacnew files, miscellaneous stuff from
de-installed packages, packages that are accidentally still installed due to
upgrade sequences or forgetfulness, enabled daemons that are no longer part
of the mainstream Linux stack (e.g. I hear HAL may be slowly going out of
fashion), new advice in the Official Install Guide that you haven't checked
in ages, new filesystem formats (or at least, making a new filesystem
eliminates any fragmentation in the old one), decaying personal knowledge
about how Linux works (due to complacency, if it's all still working, or
just not having an all-in-one chance to get a "big picture")...

Just don't delete your old "/" until a while after the new one is working,
if you can manage it.

 3) "If you were running Arch, you wouldn't be running into so many bugs
> on upgrade ... because you'd never wind up upgrading so many packages
> all at the same time."
>

yes and no. Workarounds are easier, but need to be done more often than once
every six months.  It was nice to be able to do upgrades during my
school-vacation-time rather than when I have a paper due shortly (there's
ALWAYS a paper due, or an e-mail to get back to, at my college..)

 4) "You're still running into *that* bug? That was fixed in Arch
> *months* ago!"
>

:)

-Isaac