[arch-general] on rolling release / reinstallation

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Mar 16, Isaac Dupree did say:

> I enjoyed the 6-month reinstalls... for a while. They reminded me how my
> system was set up ; to make backups ; etc.

I've got a slight difficulty with that... I've been a multi-boot guy for a
long time. It started because sometimes I couldn't get the cd burner
working in the same distro as the soundcard, on my old decrepit (now defunct)
desktop. Then one day I, (or some upgrade) borked my bootloader, {I think it
was lilo at the time...}, And I had to try to use a rescue cd... Yeah right! I
didn't know to type /usr/bin/mc instead of mc which wouldn't have helped
anyway because it turned out that rescue disk didn't have mc... {Without which I
have a hard time navigating the file system. (Why a non-gui rescue disk wouldn't
include mc is beyond me...)} Worse I didn't know which partition was which. And
being an extreme klutz with any rodent based control system, I'm excruciatingly
dependent on the keyboard shortcuts my fingers are already used to... And
unfortunately almost none of them match the default global shortcuts of any window
manager or desktop I've tried to date... Thus the gui rescue/live cd wasn't any easier.

I'm never comfortable unless I've got at least 3 fully configured 
and personalized linux installations, from different distros, so that it's
very unlikely I'll have to use some rescue or live cd that my fingers don't
already know where to find things, or that I won't be able to use my Email
to seek help... 

There are actually quite a few non-standard configurations built into my personal
~/ user file system. Such as (I don't use a /home partition because each distro may
have different versions of software that may have fits over incompatible
~/.{somethingrc} files.) Instead I have "user owned" personal partitions 
mounted at places like ~/mail ~/images etc...

But the keyboard shortcuts alone make reinstalling a distro a bit of a nightmare to
me. I mean it's not like very many desktops/window managers will let me set my global
shortcuts by editing a config file when that desktop isn't actually running. (e16 is
the only exception I've found so far, and e17 took that nice human editable config
file away...  For a while I could force feed my keybindings to e17 with something
called enlightenment_remote. (thanks to a bash script that somebody else wrote
to use it to extract configuration settings into an output bash script consisting of
a list of enlightenment_remote commands to restore them. And the keybinding
section could be used on a different version of e17 (Until the e17
developers decided that the gui tools now included enough utility to stop
supporting the underling code that enlightenment_remote depended on...)
And then there's the application shortcuts...

And did I mention that just as I'm not comfortable with having only one
distro on my PC, I'm also have never been happy with just one
desktop/window manager on any installed distro (at least not since kde4
chased me away from kde...) currently I like XFCE as a back up to e16 & e17
in part because it's fairly easy to pump in the shortcuts via pasting into
the add shortcut input box snippage from my e16 bindings.cfg file.

Actually  every time I have to do this I wind up spending so much time
reconfiguring the new install just to get it to the point where I can
stand to use it that for at least a week, my Lady is in danger of
forgetting what I look like. 

> 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..)

That makes me think... I'm new to the rolling release concept. 

So I'm guessing that these "workarounds" happen whenever a "pacman -Syu"
leads to breaking something... (Which means that I probably should only 
do an "pacman -Syu" when A) I've got time to test all my stuff. 
AND B) I've got time to look for a workaround that I hope someone else
already figured out...)

My question is how often would you recommend doing a "pacman -Syu" to avoid
having so many "workarounds" that you feel like it might have been easier
to reinstall????

-- 
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|  <?>   <?>       Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|      ^                J(tWdy)P
|    \___/         <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>