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I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never

I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never looked back. Now I have the latest version of all softwares, always.

eru 17y ago
Do you know why Ubuntu goes for `batch-releases'?
- mgunes 17y ago
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases
  - eru 17y ago
    Thanks. They explain "Ubuntu releases on a time based cycle, rather than a feature driven one."--but they seem to ignore the possibility of continuous updates.
- crocowhile 17y ago
  Officially because they should be testing the version before distributing it. The main advantage of batch-releases to my eyes is that every 6 months there is a lot of fuzz and media attention, which is very good to draw new users - so, very welcome.
Legion 17y ago
Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6. The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager. Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  In Arch, there is never a reason to "manually manage a copy outside the package manager". You can and should install everything via PKGBUILDs -- the format isn't very hard, just keep a template around, fill in the metadata, and make tweaks to the commands to run if necessary. Then everything is always kept in pacman and easy to find and/or remove. You don't even have to do this; there was a PKGBUILD added to AUR, so all you had to do in this (and most) cases is download the PKGBUILD from AUR or use something like yaourt or clyde that does this automatically. For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6. And despite Arch's rolling release cycle, I still have much less pain with it than I do with Ubuntu's custom-hybrid-half-versions, based on a release already 4-months-old, with about half of the changes in the newer versions backported, and including handfuls of patches never added upstream. See the Debian SSL fiasco for why this is a bad idea. The system is much feistier than Arch in my experience, even though Arch will occasionally perform upgrades that necessitate lots of rebuilds.
  - Legion 17y ago
    >> "For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6." Which makes it all the more disappointing that all I could find were needlessly complex solutions instead. yaourt looks very helpful. Seeing it listed as the 20th "AUR Helper" (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers) didn't exactly make it jump out at me and scream, "this is what you want!"
- crocowhile 17y ago
  > The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager. That was because you did an upgrade from a mirror in which not all packages where updated. Bad luck.
  - Legion 17y ago
    No. The packages themselves weren't up to date, it wasn't just the mirror failing to fetch the new ones. Hence threads like this one (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808 http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808) with suggestions like "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7." I didn't do an "upgrade". It was a first-time fresh install.

eru 17y ago

Do you know why Ubuntu goes for `batch-releases'?

mgunes 17y ago
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases
- eru 17y ago
  Thanks. They explain "Ubuntu releases on a time based cycle, rather than a feature driven one."--but they seem to ignore the possibility of continuous updates.
crocowhile 17y ago
Officially because they should be testing the version before distributing it. The main advantage of batch-releases to my eyes is that every 6 months there is a lot of fuzz and media attention, which is very good to draw new users - so, very welcome.

Legion 17y ago

Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6. The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager. Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.

cookiecaper 17y ago
In Arch, there is never a reason to "manually manage a copy outside the package manager". You can and should install everything via PKGBUILDs -- the format isn't very hard, just keep a template around, fill in the metadata, and make tweaks to the commands to run if necessary. Then everything is always kept in pacman and easy to find and/or remove. You don't even have to do this; there was a PKGBUILD added to AUR, so all you had to do in this (and most) cases is download the PKGBUILD from AUR or use something like yaourt or clyde that does this automatically. For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6. And despite Arch's rolling release cycle, I still have much less pain with it than I do with Ubuntu's custom-hybrid-half-versions, based on a release already 4-months-old, with about half of the changes in the newer versions backported, and including handfuls of patches never added upstream. See the Debian SSL fiasco for why this is a bad idea. The system is much feistier than Arch in my experience, even though Arch will occasionally perform upgrades that necessitate lots of rebuilds.
- Legion 17y ago
  >> "For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6." Which makes it all the more disappointing that all I could find were needlessly complex solutions instead. yaourt looks very helpful. Seeing it listed as the 20th "AUR Helper" (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers) didn't exactly make it jump out at me and scream, "this is what you want!"
crocowhile 17y ago
> The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager. That was because you did an upgrade from a mirror in which not all packages where updated. Bad luck.
- Legion 17y ago
  No. The packages themselves weren't up to date, it wasn't just the mirror failing to fetch the new ones. Hence threads like this one (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808 http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808) with suggestions like "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7." I didn't do an "upgrade". It was a first-time fresh install.