[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Ray Kohler]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Xavier Chantry <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> With every big rebuilds we get new breakage stories. It seems like
> it's the norm nowadays rather than the exception.
>
> I am wondering if it's really only the users that are to blame.. or if
> Arch is also to blame. Or if Arch was supposed to be an elitist
> distribution and is victim of its success.
>
> More importantly, I am wondering if the sodepends/soprovides proposal
> would not actually be a more complex solution than the
> libfoo2/libfoo3/libfoo4 way.

I haven't seen a single reported problem from any of the recent big
rebuilds that wasn't the result of a user doing something they ought
not to do (usually piecemeal updates), an out-of-sync mirror (plus
users that can't even recognize this when they see it), or AUR
packages not rebuilt (again, along with users that don't know they
have to do this for themselves).

I think "blame the users" is quite adequate as a solution to these
kinds of problems. There truly is a minimum level of understanding and
competency required to run Arch, and a huge number of users that
apparently don't come anywhere close to meeting it.