[arch-general] arch health

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 17:56:19 +0000, Carsten Mattner wrote:
>If I may suggest a pain point: arch needs good support for
>revoking packages and replacing with the previous version
>if regressions are encountered.

Hi,

IIRC a few downgrades happened already, but since it's a rolling
release, IMO it's understandable, that this can't be done that easy as
for release model distros with a freeze, since there are dependency
chains and Arch tries to follows upstream when ever possible, without
patching "stable" releases from upstream. If such a hiccup happens,
we could report bugs upstream and temporarily downgrade [1], or if
necessary, rebuild packages against new dependencies using PKGBUILDs
from ABS [2].

I sometimes build with fixes from upstream, e.g. git commits, that
aren't official released as a new version, without adding "-git" or
similar to the package, so next time a stable version is released, the
upgrade happens automatically. At the moment I'm doing this for jack2
[3].

Until now nobody claimed that Arch Linux is perfect, free from any
hiccups. It's just "pathetic" or "polemic" to imply that Arch tends to
become less healthy. If an issue happens, we need to establish a
differential diagnosis, instead of careless diagnosing a disease.

There are no doubts that hiccups happen from time to time, but the
advantage of Arch is, that it does follow upstream as simple and close
as possible, so it's much easier to fix an issue temporarily on your
own, perhaps with help from the community, than it could be done for
most other distros.

The more features Arch developers would add by default, the more prone
Arch would become to make fixing it harder, if an issue does arise for
your domain/usage.

My domain is real-time audio and I prefer Arch not because it's perfect
by default, but because it's perfect to fix issues even for niches. A
lot of other distros are optimised for different usages. There are
without doubts needs, that require really long term support, where
restoring from a backup isn't an option. IMO Arch is good for a
specific target group, but maybe not good for all purposes.

Any unreasonable changes won't improve Arch. Until now we only know
that somebody guess that too many packages are outdated and some
features aren't provided, because it's presumed that Arch developers
don't have the time/money to do the work.

I'm not a developer, so I won't judge this claim. However, until now no
developer agreed that there is a lack of money and time. At least not
by such an amount, that Arch danger threatens.

I don't know, but until not several users confirm that Arch's overall
health is fishy, we should assume that Arch is in good shape.

Just my 2 Cents,
Ralf

[1]
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/downgrade/
[2]
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/abs/
[3]
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Si jack2 | grep Ver
Version         : 1.9.10-6
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Q jack2
jack2 1.9.10.r261.g2d1d3235-1