[arch-general] Arch as a web server

[Dennis Herbrich]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 04:31:49PM +0200, Arno Gaboury wrote:
> On 06/19/2012 04:20 PM, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:
> >On 06/19/2012 04:14 PM, gt wrote:
> >>Can you please elaborate how you manage the regular updates, especially
> >>kernel, udev, glibc etc. Do you hold back the upgrades to packages which
> >>require a restart?
> >>
> >This is exactly how I handle kernel updates. Afaik glibc and udev
> >updates don't require reboot.
> >
> gt pointed here a good point who honestly refrains me a litle bit
> from using Arch, even if I feel comfortable with this distro and its
> community.

No need, really. You have multiple ways to deal with the rolling release model,
depending on your requirements regarding change management. For example:

* If you don't care about occasional, short downtime: Handle it like a desktop,
keep it current, reboot regularly with new kernel. This *may* cause additional
problems every now and then, though, and I wouldn't recommend this unless you
REALLY don't care about occasional downtime. ;) If you're setting up VMs
anyway, this may be the way to go nevertheless, as you can quickly swap and
test VMs before going live.

* Use a kernel-lts package. This reduces your need for reboots
considerably already.

* If you're friend of the "stable repo" approach as in debianesque systems..
well.. create one! I'm doing this with great success so far. With a bit
of shell trickery you can stuff all packages of a running system into your
own repository, and you dub this stable. You may then choose to cherrypick
and test new package versions from core/extra/community, or roll your own if
there's a specific patch you'd want to have integrated, but not bump the
version altogether for whatever reason. The latter is actually required much
less often than I thought initially, as incompatible version upgrades are
relatively rare in the first place.

To sum it up, with Arch you can basically choose your own approach to
stabilizing your package sources. On the other hand, you will have to manage it
yourself, too, unless you find a "public" stable repository which you trust to
do the job well.
  
Best regards,
  Dennis

-- 
"Den Rechtsstaat macht aus, dass Unschuldige wieder frei kommen."
  Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, Bundesinnenminister (14.10.08, TAZ-Interview)

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