[arch-general] Ignoring packages and piecemeal updates

[Isaac Dupree]

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