4 ms·

This! Our company OpenSUSE Tumbleweeds were still vulnerable on Friday. On Arch, the package was already available for two days then. The thing is, the distro

This! Our company OpenSUSE Tumbleweeds were still vulnerable on Friday. On Arch, the package was already available for two days then. The thing is, the distro maintainers need to decide whether they want a fast moving "latest and greatest" approach, which might break stuff by accident, or go a "slow but always dependable" route, which you can depend on as company, with painful losses if things go south (in which case there should be an express lane for important security fixes).

snazz 7y ago
As I mentioned downthread, surprisingly little stuff breaks by accident nowadays on Arch (on my desktop, zero breakage in the last year with a fairly complex stack; on one server machine I had one strange interaction between a language package manager and pacman that ended up being my fault). The "slow but dependable" solution ends up breaking as soon as software becomes too complex for maintainers to be able to backport security fixes onto old versions, so they just ship the latest version of those packages, negating the dependability aspect (like Debian's treatment of Firefox and Chromium).
jolmg 7y ago
It's perhaps coincidental, but I don't remember ever having a trouble on an update that I couldn't find a quick fix for in the Archlinux homepage. In my opinion, the reason why Archlinux can be so dependable is that packaging is based on really simple ideas, like not starting or stopping services on installation like Ubuntu would, and that most if not all system files belong to a package. The package manager can do a whole OS installation just by installing the basic packages on a directory different from /. The package format is also really simple. Getting into the guts of Archlinux packaging is really approachable and that makes me feel at ease for whatever trouble I may find myself in.

4 ms·

This! Our company OpenSUSE Tumbleweeds were still vulnerable on Friday. On Arch, the package was already available for two days then. The thing is, the distro

by archi42 7y ago

snazz 7y ago
As I mentioned downthread, surprisingly little stuff breaks by accident nowadays on Arch (on my desktop, zero breakage in the last year with a fairly complex stack; on one server machine I had one strange interaction between a language package manager and pacman that ended up being my fault). The "slow but dependable" solution ends up breaking as soon as software becomes too complex for maintainers to be able to backport security fixes onto old versions, so they just ship the latest version of those packages, negating the dependability aspect (like Debian's treatment of Firefox and Chromium).
jolmg 7y ago
It's perhaps coincidental, but I don't remember ever having a trouble on an update that I couldn't find a quick fix for in the Archlinux homepage. In my opinion, the reason why Archlinux can be so dependable is that packaging is based on really simple ideas, like not starting or stopping services on installation like Ubuntu would, and that most if not all system files belong to a package. The package manager can do a whole OS installation just by installing the basic packages on a directory different from /. The package format is also really simple. Getting into the guts of Archlinux packaging is really approachable and that makes me feel at ease for whatever trouble I may find myself in.