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Well.. It was the /r/linux survey? Arch seems to have the Haskell problem: avoiding success at all costs. Although, many see this as a feature and not a bug.

by codemac 14y ago

sirclueless 14y ago
How so? In that it makes breaking changes often? I like its model better than other distros: rather than duplicating effort backporting bugfixes to make old versions stable and secure, they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there. I understand not wanting to sysadmin a large number of Arch machines though.
- martius 14y ago
  I'm an Archlinux user, and BC aren't happening that often (seriously). Some big moves (likes switching to systemd) required some work, but still ran smoothly. For my own computers (including the laptop I work with) it's almost perfect.
  - laumars 14y ago
    Normally I'd agree with you, but the last 12 months have seen some pretty disruptive changes (the glibc update caught me out more than systemd had). Arch is far from perfect, and I'm not convinced I like the direction it's heading in (re systemd), but that's a plauge for the wider ecosystem than an Arch-specific issue. However Arch definitely find a nice balance between "hands on" and "lazy administration" for desktop users. Sadly though, systemd was the last straw that saw the start of my migration away from Arch on the servers (now a balance of FreeBSD and Debian; depending on the requirements of that server). As with everything though, it's all personal preference. So I expect plenty of people to have a different opinion (and different experiences as well).
    - ffreire 14y ago
      What's worked for me has been to read the archlinux.org homepage before I upgrade (maybe once every few days). If there are any breaking changes they are listed along with the recommended method for handling them. If I somehow fat finger a command and it doesn't go smoothly then all I have to do is jump in #archlinux and my issue is resolved in under an hour. YMMV of course but I've found the entire Arch experience to be pleasant and it fits my work flow, but I understand that it doesn't fit everyone's.
- mapleoin 14y ago
  they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there That's what most ditros do. Fedora and openSUSE anyway. While we wait for upstream to fix the issue and release a new version, we prefer to have a working package, though.
  - pavanky 14y ago
    aur.
  - sirclueless 14y ago
    True, though I think the "Push for it to get fixed" part is more important than you are giving credit for. Bugs from Arch are urgent, simply because all their users are stuck waiting on the fix which means affected users will be interested in updating and communicating about the upstream report. Also they are probably on an unpatched recent stable release, which makes a good baseline -- either the bug was fixed in master since the recent release, or it is still present and real. There's little question whether a bug is caused by a distro-specific patch or not, because Arch linux packages are more or less thin build scripts around unpatched sources. You find things like .desktop files and systemd unit files in the Arch package repo, but not many source patches that might introduce unreproducible bugs. It's easy to see why running Arch is painful for a sysadmin: You get stuck with all the variance in maintenance quality of upstream packages with not much recourse other than building a fixed package from source yourself (thankfully this is pretty easy with Arch's build system). On the other hand it's easy to see why this is great for the linux ecosystem: A popular distro running recent unpatched stable binaries means a lot of testing of releases soon after they come out, which surfaces upstream problems faster and encourages faster maintenance cycles and better upstream releases that benefit everyone.
- DanBC 14y ago
  > they report everything upstream ... and then a member of the Arch community writes a really nice document about alternatives and work arounds and fixes and puts that on a wiki somewhere. The Arch documentation is a jewel, and I very much hope they manage to continue that tradition.
- codemac 14y ago
  You missed my lame attempt at a joke, haskell's unofficial slogan is "Avoid success at all costs!" Archlinux is doing amazingly well by sticking with the "Arch Way", even when it has user visible side effects (lol haskell). This success is evident from distrowatch, this survey, and others.
praptak 14y ago
Yeah, count me in the feature-not-a-bug camp. It is avoiding popularity rather than success. And I parse it rather as "avoid some nasty costs that could boost popularity" not as "spare no costs when actively decreasing popularity".
dschiptsov 14y ago
Yeah, systemd and grub2 are Haskell-ish way of making everything in a "proper way", "not for everyone".))) But, see, you can almost type-check your tens of grub2 confs!

Well.. It was the /r/linux survey? Arch seems to have the Haskell problem: avoiding success at all costs. Although, many see this as a feature and not a bug.

by codemac 14y ago

Well.. It was the /r/linux survey? Arch seems to have the Haskell problem: avoiding success at all costs. Although, many see this as a feature and not a bug.

sirclueless 14y ago

How so? In that it makes breaking changes often? I like its model better than other distros: rather than duplicating effort backporting bugfixes to make old versions stable and secure, they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there. I understand not wanting to sysadmin a large number of Arch machines though.

martius 14y ago
I'm an Archlinux user, and BC aren't happening that often (seriously). Some big moves (likes switching to systemd) required some work, but still ran smoothly. For my own computers (including the laptop I work with) it's almost perfect.
- laumars 14y ago
  Normally I'd agree with you, but the last 12 months have seen some pretty disruptive changes (the glibc update caught me out more than systemd had). Arch is far from perfect, and I'm not convinced I like the direction it's heading in (re systemd), but that's a plauge for the wider ecosystem than an Arch-specific issue. However Arch definitely find a nice balance between "hands on" and "lazy administration" for desktop users. Sadly though, systemd was the last straw that saw the start of my migration away from Arch on the servers (now a balance of FreeBSD and Debian; depending on the requirements of that server). As with everything though, it's all personal preference. So I expect plenty of people to have a different opinion (and different experiences as well).
  - ffreire 14y ago
    What's worked for me has been to read the archlinux.org homepage before I upgrade (maybe once every few days). If there are any breaking changes they are listed along with the recommended method for handling them. If I somehow fat finger a command and it doesn't go smoothly then all I have to do is jump in #archlinux and my issue is resolved in under an hour. YMMV of course but I've found the entire Arch experience to be pleasant and it fits my work flow, but I understand that it doesn't fit everyone's.
mapleoin 14y ago
they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there That's what most ditros do. Fedora and openSUSE anyway. While we wait for upstream to fix the issue and release a new version, we prefer to have a working package, though.
- pavanky 14y ago
  aur.
- sirclueless 14y ago
  True, though I think the "Push for it to get fixed" part is more important than you are giving credit for. Bugs from Arch are urgent, simply because all their users are stuck waiting on the fix which means affected users will be interested in updating and communicating about the upstream report. Also they are probably on an unpatched recent stable release, which makes a good baseline -- either the bug was fixed in master since the recent release, or it is still present and real. There's little question whether a bug is caused by a distro-specific patch or not, because Arch linux packages are more or less thin build scripts around unpatched sources. You find things like .desktop files and systemd unit files in the Arch package repo, but not many source patches that might introduce unreproducible bugs. It's easy to see why running Arch is painful for a sysadmin: You get stuck with all the variance in maintenance quality of upstream packages with not much recourse other than building a fixed package from source yourself (thankfully this is pretty easy with Arch's build system). On the other hand it's easy to see why this is great for the linux ecosystem: A popular distro running recent unpatched stable binaries means a lot of testing of releases soon after they come out, which surfaces upstream problems faster and encourages faster maintenance cycles and better upstream releases that benefit everyone.
DanBC 14y ago
> they report everything upstream ... and then a member of the Arch community writes a really nice document about alternatives and work arounds and fixes and puts that on a wiki somewhere. The Arch documentation is a jewel, and I very much hope they manage to continue that tradition.
codemac 14y ago
You missed my lame attempt at a joke, haskell's unofficial slogan is "Avoid success at all costs!" Archlinux is doing amazingly well by sticking with the "Arch Way", even when it has user visible side effects (lol haskell). This success is evident from distrowatch, this survey, and others.

praptak 14y ago

Yeah, count me in the feature-not-a-bug camp. It is avoiding popularity rather than success. And I parse it rather as "avoid some nasty costs that could boost popularity" not as "spare no costs when actively decreasing popularity".

dschiptsov 14y ago

Yeah, systemd and grub2 are Haskell-ish way of making everything in a "proper way", "not for everyone".))) But, see, you can almost type-check your tens of grub2 confs!