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DUR: The Debian User Repository

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Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#91

Post by nextlevelwizard »

spinax wrote: post #76
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your anecdotal failures First of all how are these MY failures and not failures of the Arch ecosystem? Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots. Installing a very stable software such as fucking python3 shouldn't break litereally everything else that is linked to same lib. Everything is anecdotal, but trying to use that to dimiss literally OS breaking inciden…

> If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keep…

I like how you Arch guys seem to paint rest of us as some old folks who upate once a year our packages. I was literally running pacman -Suy weekly, but none of that should matter. It is the distribution maintainers and the package managers literal job to keep the OS running and runnable. It shouldn't matter how often I update my packages they should be migrated from one version to the next like any sane package manager does.

>It's build for experienced Linux techs who like to engage on a regular basis with the plumbing.

Yeah, sure. This is where the "Linux is only free if your time has no value" saying comes from. I think I've said this in all comments in the thread, but if it isn't abundantly clear anyone is free to use any distro they want or any OS for that matter (I use all major 3 almost daily), but I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#92

Post by tinus_hn »

cookiengineer wrote: post #62
tinus_hn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would rather have them waste that exact same amount of space on every computer, just so you don’t have to download it when you want to build a package?

> So you would rather have them waste that exact same amount of space on every computer, just so you don’t have to download it when you want to build a package? Header files are literally less than a couple kB per package, and Megabyte-sized headers are the exception for huge frameworks like QT or GACL. Arch packages don't ship the source codes, only the binaries (.so files) and headers (.h files). Overall, the /usr/…

I’m not sure what the argument is here. Either the header files you have to download are big so you shouldn’t have them on your system if you don’t need them, or they’re not big so it’s not a problem to just use the apt command to download all the header packages you need to build the package you want.

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#93

Post by yrro »

kijin wrote: post #56
andrewshadura wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, init scripts are only used if there's no unit file. If there's a systemd unit, the init script is ignored.

If there's a systemd unit, the init script is redundant, confusing, and possibly dangerous. It should not exist in the first place, perhaps except as a thin wrapper around the corresponding systemd command.

If you invoke the init script on a system booted with systems then it does indeed wrap the equivalent systemctl command.

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#94

Post by mst »

thayne wrote: post #14
bscphil wrote: post #2

I'm excited to see someone is working on this. I have considered switching from Arch to Sid in the past, mainly so that I could run the same OS on all computers and because I like the DFSG. Two things have stopped me: * It's so much harder to build your own software packages on Debian. Even patching an existing Debian package can be painful, and having to write your own packages is even worse. I'm sure a dedicated en…

> The systemd integration is currently quite bad. It's probably the source of a bunch of user complaints about systemd. I haven't used plain Debian, but this has been my experience with Ubuntu. Almost all the problems I've run into with systemd have been because of an interaction with init.d scripts that should be systemd units, or similar. My biggest complaint is that while systemd-resolved is supposed to be optiona…

This is actually something that keeps tempting me to try arch, since it having gone all-in on systemd early on would hopefully give me a more 'native' systemd experience and help me figure out which of my gripes are with systemd and which of them are with how-$distro-added-systemd.

Thing is, I'd only want such an install for playing around with occasionally and as the argument upthread makes pretty clear, "doing a bulk upgrade occasionally" is something that really isn't regarded as a sensible way to run arch.

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#95

Post by mst »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #85
kijin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's a systemd unit, the init script is redundant, confusing, and possibly dangerous. It should not exist in the first place, perhaps except as a thin wrapper around the corresponding systemd command.

If the package maintainer wants to support systemd-less systems out there, I don't see a reason to not let them to.

Having that support come in the form of installing both on all systems does have its downsides though.

OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if every other feasible approach's downsides are widely regarded to be worse.

Software. Yay :D

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#96

Post by seba_dos1 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #90
seba_dos1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots Says who? That's pretty much not what Arch tries to guarantee at all. You're at the very least supposed to read the announcements and you should upgrade often, as otherwise the end result is undefined. Some distros like Debian support partial updates, Arch very explicitly does not. If you use Arch the way it's intende…

Sorry what? So you have to go read a news site if it is OK to update your packages? What the hell is the point of having "rolling distro with all the new shit" if you have to be constantly afraid if you can update your packages or not? >you should upgrade often But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday is not quranteed to leave you with working OS

> So you have to go read a news site if it is OK to update your packages?

Not "if it's ok to update", but "whether there's manual intervention required". See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Pac.... Not reading that before upgrade seems to be the main reason for post-upgrade failures.

> But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday

The point was that you should rather upgrade "every Friday" than "any given Friday".

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#97

Post by bscphil »

pxc wrote: post #87
spinax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had 700 packages or so updating You absolutely ignored your Arch system for far too long and most likely missed important News notifications that manual actions were required, it happens now and again. With updating 700 packages at once you've just dug yourself a hole - Arch is not a system you can ignore for that long, by design it's always changing to reflect the newest upstream changes to software. As I posted…

Imo this is a lame excuse. Some rolling release distros whose packages more or less equally up-to-date are far less brittle, namely NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Arch's demanding nature with respect to being routinely updated follows directly from the fact that its package manager is stateful and unsophisticated (e.g., its dependency resolver is incomplete (will fail even when solutions are available, because depend…

> A glance at the online Arch package listing and some example .PKGINFO files indicates that Pacman also doesn't support metadata like 'provides' and 'replaces' in DEB and RPM, which means the developers have fewer tools at their disposal for dealing with transitions like that, even when they want to.

I guess this is what you get for making assumptions about a platform you're technically unfamiliar with, isn't it?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#Package_relations

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#98

Post by bscphil »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #91
spinax wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I type in `apt update && apt update -y` I can be sure that my computer will be usable after a reboot As from my other replies, that's awesome - you're looking for a usage paradigm that is not what Arch is for; it requires attention and regular maintenance, and "keeping up" on a regular basis. You've hit the nail on the head with the followup sentence, you have to be willing to spend a day every now and then keep…

I like how you Arch guys seem to paint rest of us as some old folks who upate once a year our packages. I was literally running pacman -Suy weekly, but none of that should matter. It is the distribution maintainers and the package managers literal job to keep the OS running and runnable. It shouldn't matter how often I update my packages they should be migrated from one version to the next like any sane package manag…

> I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.

Yes, exactly right. As an Arch user, I endorse this.

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#99

Post by bscphil »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #90
seba_dos1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running `pacman -Syu` on any given Friday should NOT leave you with a machine that no longer boots Says who? That's pretty much not what Arch tries to guarantee at all. You're at the very least supposed to read the announcements and you should upgrade often, as otherwise the end result is undefined. Some distros like Debian support partial updates, Arch very explicitly does not. If you use Arch the way it's intende…

Sorry what? So you have to go read a news site if it is OK to update your packages? What the hell is the point of having "rolling distro with all the new shit" if you have to be constantly afraid if you can update your packages or not? >you should upgrade often But you litereally started by saying that upgrading any given Friday is not quranteed to leave you with working OS

This is literally intended. Arch is a rolling release distribution, and more than that, it's a distribution which sticks very closely to upstream and tries to have a single correct way to do things. To have all those things at once, you have to have competent users who are willing and able to make changes to their system to keep up with the distribution.

To give a practical example. In 2013 Arch Linux merged all binaries into /usr/bin. This architectural improvement was obviously a major change, and the way Arch is designed as a rolling distro meant that you couldn't leave users behind on the old way of doing things. After the change, everyone needed to be using the merged /usr/bin.

This is a designed lack of backwards compatibility that means you're guaranteed to be using the latest system architecture at all times, reducing the maintenance burden for the maintainers and making sure everything just works most of the time. But it also means that you have to be willing to do system maintenance to get your local system in line with what the Arch devs use. In the case of the /usr/bin merge, manual steps to perform the upgrade were required. [1] They weren't hard, but Arch requires this kind of oversight as part of its design.

If you're not willing to perform that kind of maintenance, then Do Not Use Arch! It's designed for people who are - although in practice this kind of intervention is required only about once a year.

[1]https://archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring...

Re: DUR: The Debian User Repository

#100

Post by bscphil »

mst wrote: post #94
thayne wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The systemd integration is currently quite bad. It's probably the source of a bunch of user complaints about systemd. I haven't used plain Debian, but this has been my experience with Ubuntu. Almost all the problems I've run into with systemd have been because of an interaction with init.d scripts that should be systemd units, or similar. My biggest complaint is that while systemd-resolved is supposed to be optiona…

This is actually something that keeps tempting me to try arch, since it having gone all-in on systemd early on would hopefully give me a more 'native' systemd experience and help me figure out which of my gripes are with systemd and which of them are with how-$distro-added-systemd. Thing is, I'd only want such an install for playing around with occasionally and as the argument upthread makes pretty clear, "doing a bu…

I do my upgrades every few weeks, for what it's worth, and I've had the same Arch install since 2013. The size of the upgrade should very rarely have any effect on whether it succeeds; you're just more likely to have missed some major changes if you're upgrading without checking the latest news from the website.

Partial updates are also unsupported, and in my experience that's the most common way people break things.

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