Arch Linux

[Fatsobob]

I feel like starting an arch linux topic.
I was listening to some older recordings and I happened to scroll accross my new favorite one, the one where you guys interviewed Judd Vinet. Though this is just a general topic, I will start it off with the following question. How about gettin another interview with Judd to check back up with arch.

[Patrick]

How about gettin another interview with Judd to check back up with arch.

Judd is always welcome back. I'll send him an email to see when he's available. He's a pretty busy guy, last time it took a while to nail down a date.

[Tsuroerusu]

How about gettin another interview with Judd to check back up with arch.

He's a pretty busy guy, last time it took a while to nail down a date.

Yeah, he had to get his box going first!

Sorry, just couldn't resist that one.

[Patrick]

Yeah, he had to get his box going first!

Sorry, just couldn't resist that one.

I really like what Arch is trying to do. It's a very simply laid out linux distro. I think the big issue is that it's very bleeding edge and things break every so often. More so then the "stable distros". I think it needs to mature some and improve in the following areas:
- the 'stable' version truly needs to be stable
- documentation has to improve
- the installer needs to improve (and it should be updated more often) Perhaps a netinstall that gets updated every 6 months is the way to go
- quality control of packages needs to improve
- it needs to follow the LSB guidelines and be certified as LSB compliant

Just my .02

[Tsuroerusu]

Yeah, he had to get his box going first!

Sorry, just couldn't resist that one.

I really like what Arch is trying to do. It's a very simply laid out linux distro. I think the big issue is that it's very bleeding edge and things break every so often. More so then the "stable distros".

Do they branch their distro, and freeze a release "branch", or is there only like one single branch?

I think it needs to mature some and improve in the following areas:

- the 'stable' version truly needs to be stable

Anything less is too Gentoo-like for me.

- documentation has to improve

'ey, if you do BSD-style init scripts, you might as well take one other note out of the BSD's book .... good documentation.

- the installer needs to improve (and it should be updated more often) Perhaps a netinstall that gets updated every 6 months is the way to go

Are you talking about the actual installation program, or like a release every six months, like OpenBSD, for example, do?

- it needs to follow the LSB guidelines and be certified as LSB compliant

Is that actually possible with a distro that don't use or slightly emulate SysV-style init scripts.

[Patrick]

Are you talking about the actual installation program, or like a release every six months, like OpenBSD, for example, do?

They follow a rolling release cycle where the release are just snapshots. The installer should be updated every 6 months and should only use the "release" packages.

Is that actually possible with a distro that don't use or slightly emulate SysV-style init scripts.

Good question. Here's LSB guide on init scripts:
http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3 ... sinit.html

Here's a list of LSB compliant distros:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Products

Slackware isn't on the list even though it does support System V init scripts since version 7?

[Ruhar]

I've tried Arch several times and quite liked it once it was up and running. I just couldn't take the system breakage. You really need to upgrade often in order minimize system turmoil. Also, I experienced too many packages that were corrupt on the mirrors and would not install. I think its a great distro. I just need a bit more stability. Hence, Slack.

[Chess]

Do they branch their distro, and freeze a release "branch", or is there only like one single branch?

No, there is no stable branch. You don't have people running an older version of Arch like some people run old versions of Debian, Slackware, or a BSD branch. There are people running old Slackware 8.1 boxes, or old FreeBSD 4.11 boxes or whatever. With Arch, you don't have that. There are no stable branches that get security updates, for example. It is solely a continual rolling release. That's why I would never use it on a server and would only use it on a desktop (which I do) that is for personal use, subject to breakage.

[CptnObvious999]

- the 'stable' version truly needs to be stable

Anything less is too Gentoo-like for me.

*sigh* I would expect you to say something like that.

In regards to stability, Gentoo and Arch don't go by specific versions and get to start over like everyone else does. They have too keep their products stable with basically a lifetime of their other packages unlike SuSE which only have to worry about working with packages specifically for 10.2 (or whatever version). Trying to do this with the insane amount of packages that portage has is by no means an easy task and I think they have done an outstanding job thus far. That said there are a lot more people who get paid to work on SuSE and Ubuntu and the like while that is not really the case for Arch and Gentoo, they have to work on a shoe-string budget which can be hard.

I am not trying to start an all out Distro-war although Tsuroerusu may want to, I am just saying you at least have to give them credit for their effort. And the way you stated it *was* a straight out attack at the Gentoo project which is not by any means productive or nice. I myself do not like Gnome but I would never straight out attack them because they do give a lot of effort and their product is rather good, I only ask you give everyone the respect they deserve.

[Tsuroerusu]

- the 'stable' version truly needs to be stable

Anything less is too Gentoo-like for me.

*sigh* I would expect you to say something like that.

In regards to stability, Gentoo and Arch don't go by specific versions and get to start over like everyone else does. They have too keep their products stable with basically a lifetime of their other packages unlike SuSE which only have to worry about working with packages specifically for 10.2 (or whatever version). Trying to do this with the insane amount of packages that portage has is by no means an easy task and I think they have done an outstanding job thus far. That said there are a lot more people who get paid to work on SuSE and Ubuntu and the like while that is not really the case for Arch and Gentoo, they have to work on a shoe-string budget which can be hard.

I am not trying to start an all out Distro-war although Tsuroerusu may want to, I am just saying you at least have to give them credit for their effort. And the way you stated it *was* a straight out attack at the Gentoo project which is not by any means productive or nice. I myself do not like Gnome but I would never straight out attack them because they do give a lot of effort and their product is rather good, I only ask you give everyone the respect they deserve.

When I said Gentoo-like I meant the "rolling-release" thing, which I know some people like, and some people don't. I have heard pretty much all the arguments for it, but none of them really make sense in the end, from my point of view.

I have always given Gentoo credit for their documentation, they have done a great job on that. Although, I would say the BSDs was the inspiration for that, Gentoo did a good job with it for GNU/Linux.

Now having said that, I think Gentoo's portage QA is terrible. For a hobbyist, or developer machine, where you most likely would be working with CVS checkouts and the like, it makes sense, however for any kind of production workstation or server, it's a terrible idea. On a live, production web server you want everything to just keep running as it is once you got everything set up. If I installed Red Hat Enterprise 4, back when it first came out, on a web server, I would use Red Hat's management tool to receive updates. I don't remember how up2date works, but you would do basically the equivalent of "yum update" or "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" and then you receive a security fix and you're good to go. Of course, if I was running Yahoo or something similar, I would have a test box to test an update on to make sure it didn't break the application (PHP AJAX stuff just as an example) I was running on the server (You do that with all OSes on all production-critical servers), but once done, you install the patch and restart the server daemon you're running, and you're done.

On a server, what you really do NOT want is to have to install a new version of Apache to still get security updates for it. What you want is just a x.x.x_12x kind of update, that fixes that one, or multiple, security patches. But you don't want any feature additions or removals (Again, unless absolutely required for security or something like that).

When you run Red Hat Enterprise, you will receive security updates for 7 flippin' years, that's 7 years of running Apache 1.3.x.x, why change when it does what you need it to do? I have heard Linc and Dann talk about Slackware 8 boxes still working wonderfully as servers, in production environments, you want everything to stay the same, unless you need a change, and you rarely do.

If I installed Gentoo in 2003, got it running just as well as say a Red Hat 9 (I'm using Red Hat as the example of a "frozen" distro, but feel free to insert Slackware, if you want to) box would, with KDE etc. etc., and then gave the box to my mom, and then she used it for 4 years, while I went to study in another country. If I then come home and want to check for updates, well with Red Hat 9, there'd be quite a few updates to install, and I would probably want to see what packages that would need updating before I hit the "Update" button, but in most cases like this, I could in theory just hit updates and everything would be OK. With Gentoo (And any "rolling-release" for that matter), I would have to really get nitty gritty and really read up on changes, read changelogs, do the update and see what breaks, and then go and fix the breakages.
If you think that that is a fine in a production environment, nice to see you would put some dedication into your job etc. etc., but good luck administrating web servers in the case of a large website, over periods of years with that methodology.

[CptnObvious999]

When I look at all the people who are going the hard time of updating to Windows Vista I wonder how much better if things were instead slowly integrated into the system via Windows Update. That would make the transition much better wouldn't it? Maybe it's just me but I think it would be better, instead of having to reinstall every 2 years you just use the same install for the lifetime of the hardware. The downside to this is you will eventually get some slight breakage which can be fixed by running a few commands. I think breakage is the lesser of the two evils IMHO.

[Chess]

@theOP:

As a desktop Linux distribution, Arch Linux is fantastic. Yes, there are breakages from time to time. However, not as many you might think. One of my workstations has an Arch install from about 1 to 1 1/2 yrs ago and it's chugging along great, with all the latest and greatest packages. There have been 2-3 major breakages in that time frame, but nothing that I was not able to fix after reading the Arch linux home page or forums. One major breakage was Xorg related, one was related to changing how they do their init ramdisks, and there was one thing, but I can't remember.

Otherwise, you can pull down and easily install just about anything you want. It's a very fun distro to use on the desktop as long as you don't mind using the command line.

[Tsuroerusu]

When I look at all the people who are going the hard time of updating to Windows Vista I wonder how much better if things were instead slowly integrated into the system via Windows Update. That would make the transition much better wouldn't it? Maybe it's just me but I think it would be better, instead of having to reinstall every 2 years you just use the same install for the lifetime of the hardware. The downside to this is you will eventually get some slight breakage which can be fixed by running a few commands. I think breakage is the lesser of the two evils IMHO.

This is NOT what you want, because you can't risk that Windows will give a user an error message that says something like "Can't boot disk.. OK" in HEX. What you want to do is release something and then just have it work (Which is debatable in Microsoft's case, about whether they can do something like this or not), and work until you have a physical hardware error. Windows Update is DEFINITELY not the place to introduce new features (Although they did do that kind of thing with SP2), because the combinations your customers will be trying to install on is endless. There's the hardware, and thereby driver, issues, and then there's software that spears into the beating heart of the OS such as antivirus, personal firewalls or anti-spyware etc. etc.

Windows XP will be supported on the business desktop until around 2014, which is extended support. For home users I'd expect Microsoft to kill it with a stick in about 3 or 5 years.
So current Windows XP users can happily use their machines for those years, and by then, the uses of computers have changed so much that their machine can't handle new stuff anyway, so they go down to Circuit City and buys a new machine, and use it for 5 o 6 more years, depending on what type of person we're talking about.

The problem is not having a big revamp every 4 years, or whatever it is, the problem is having breakages once or twice every quarter. This is something you can't have, you need things to just darn work.

[snarkout]

I really like what Arch is trying to do. It's a very simply laid out linux distro. I think the big issue is that it's very bleeding edge and things break every so often. More so then the "stable distros". I think it needs to mature some and improve in the following areas:
- the 'stable' version truly needs to be stable
- documentation has to improve
- the installer needs to improve (and it should be updated more often) Perhaps a netinstall that gets updated every 6 months is the way to go
- quality control of packages needs to improve
- it needs to follow the LSB guidelines and be certified as LSB compliant

Just my .02

As Chess pointed out, there really isn't a "stable" release to track. You're running -current, or you're running -release. Running -release means no updates at all, IIRC.

The documentation does have shortcomings, this is true. Though I have been able to figure pretty much anything I needed to out with the wiki and the forums. It would certainly be very nice if the docs were as well put together as gentoo's, though. In fact, I generally just look in gentoo's docs if I can't get something done on arch that isn't Arch specific.

The installer for the 0.8.0 disk is a large improvement over the 0.7.* series. It's still not as bonehead simple as the debian/ubuntu curses install, but it's a lot less obtuse. While it would be nice if there was a snapshot disk every 6 months, I'd rather have the devs working on things like the upcoming pacman3 than spinning an iso.

I haven't had many issues with package quality, but I have had issues with breakage. God knows I've done my share of pissing and moaning about it, too. At the end of the day, though, I suppose breakage is part of running a bleeding edge, smaller community distro.

I can't comment on the LSB guidelines thing since I haven't paid attention to that stuff in quite a while. What specifically are you referring to?

For me, at least on my workstation, Arch is awesome. Some things don't work the way I want them to, sure, but I never feel like Arch is "getting in my way." I feel like Kubuntu is constantly in my way on my lappy. I'm sure this is somewhat subjective, but I'm pretty damn tired of dealing with dozens of small config files, some of which are symlinks to other small files in both the debian based and redhat based world.

I'm also tired of what I've come to think of as the "kubuntu way" which is regressions that "are for your own good." Moving from media:// to /media and causing all sorts of holy hell for your users, and then having the nerve to say "it's just better this way, trust us" really galls my ass. I haven't noticed a single benefit as an end user, but have had all sorts of issues with removable media since about halfway into the 6 months of Dapper. I simply don't have these sorts of issues with Arch - if it isn't working, it's because I haven't spent the time to figure it out, not because someone decided what was best for me and patched the living hell out of KDE. Ok, rant over. I guess I'm sort of at the ESR point with Kubuntu, though.

[CptnObvious999]

This is NOT what you want, because you can't risk that Windows will give a user an error message that says something like "Can't boot disk.. OK" in HEX. What you want to do is release something and then just have it work (Which is debatable in Microsoft's case, about whether they can do something like this or not), and work until you have a physical hardware error. Windows Update is DEFINITELY not the place to introduce new features (Although they did do that kind of thing with SP2), because the combinations your customers will be trying to install on is endless. There's the hardware, and thereby driver, issues, and then there's software that spears into the beating heart of the OS such as antivirus, personal firewalls or anti-spyware etc. etc.

To be fair to Microsoft Windows Update has never broken anything that I have seen yet and most of my new job is simply running that on every computer. I don't know when you last ran Windows and for how long but things have gotten better.

Windows XP will be supported on the business desktop until around 2014, which is extended support. For home users I'd expect Microsoft to kill it with a stick in about 3 or 5 years.
So current Windows XP users can happily use their machines for those years, and by then, the uses of computers have changed so much that their machine can't handle new stuff anyway, so they go down to Circuit City and buys a new machine, and use it for 5 o 6 more years, depending on what type of person we're talking about.

For the desktop the rolling-release is less effective yes, however with Linux distrobutions the average release cycle is every 6 months which is an aweful lot. To reinstall that often is a little bit much IMHO, which is why a rolling-release distro seems more viable to me.

The problem is not having a big revamp every 4 years, or whatever it is, the problem is having breakages once or twice every quarter. This is something you can't have, you need things to just darn work.

Your assumption assumes that nothing at all breaks on a release based distro which is not the case. I also thing you are exagerating the stability of a gentoo system. Run Gentoo stable and run "glsa-check -f all" every week and see how long you go before breakage, I garantee you will go at least a year.