[arch-general] on rolling release / reinstallation

[Isaac Dupree]

On 03/16/10 14:12, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> On 03/16/2010 01:58 PM, Thayer Williams wrote:
>> Welcome aboard and glad you're getting things sorted out. Once you
>> have used a rolling release distro, everything else just seems silly.
>> Reinstall every six months? No thanks!

I enjoyed the 6-month reinstalls... for a while. They reminded me how my 
system was set up ; to make backups ; etc.

> When I hear about issues people run into when upgrading to, say, the
> latest version of Ubuntu, my thinking is usually some combination of:
>
> 1) "What's an OS upgrade?"
>
> 2) "What's an OS version?"

true. and on the occasion that Ubuntu breaks something in a stable 
upgrade, it's awful (although I'm not sure this ever actually happened 
to me).

I still reckon it's useful to reinstall Arch every few years, as "/" 
gets cluttered with old layouts, .pacnew files, miscellaneous stuff from 
de-installed packages, packages that are accidentally still installed 
due to upgrade sequences or forgetfulness, enabled daemons that are no 
longer part of the mainstream Linux stack (e.g. I hear HAL may be slowly 
going out of fashion), new advice in the Official Install Guide that you 
haven't checked in ages, new filesystem formats (or at least, making a 
new filesystem eliminates any fragmentation in the old one), decaying 
personal knowledge about how Linux works (due to complacency, if it's 
all still working, or just not having an all-in-one chance to get a "big 
picture")...

Just don't delete your old "/" until a while after the new one is 
working, if you can manage it.

> 3) "If you were running Arch, you wouldn't be running into so many bugs
> on upgrade ... because you'd never wind up upgrading so many packages
> all at the same time."

yes and no. Workarounds are easier, but need to be done more often than 
once every six months.  It was nice to be able to do upgrades during my 
school-vacation-time rather than when I have a paper due shortly 
(there's ALWAYS a paper due, or an e-mail to get back to, at my college..)

> 4) "You're still running into *that* bug? That was fixed in Arch
> *months* ago!"

:)

-Isaac