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Wednesday, June 05, 2013

ArchLinux Might Not Play Cool

Update

This rant, referred to that time, is still valid. However, the lastest ArchLinuxARM package has been updated after the big change and everything works again as expected. Thanks Arch Linux for updating all packages, appreciated!
I'm actually avoiding a title such WTF ArchLinux to not leave a mark for this awesome community ... I mean, the best of the best: an always updated Linux distro for many devices and architectures blazing fast on boot time and freaking lightweight so you can put any extra you want and nothing more .. how can anyone ask more ...

Kids Play Too Much There

No, really ... this is not about blaming anyone specifically but seriously, a change able to brick every device ain't cool guys, not at all.

Cannot Trust Pacman Anymore

The main tool designed to update your system is screwed for basically every single tutorial about installing Arch Linux I could find on the net. pacman is doomed by an update, philosophically superfluous, able to make the update manager itself a joke.
That's correct, now you need to update all tutorials out there that says that
to update your system, you should simply pacman -Syu and working magic happens
Now every single piece of internet related to pacman or how ArchLinux is updated won't work anymore.

Cubieboard Is Just One

Every single article that will make you happy about installing ArchLinux in this board, or any other, will piss you off if source files you download are before 4th of July 2013 because the moment you can say hooray, it worked and you'll keep following instructions that will tell you best thing ever to do after a successful ArchLinux installation is to pacman -Syu as first command will nicely fuck up all your effort.

Focusing On Something Else

I am a developer and I love tools. The OS is just one of them to me, the one that makes me work and experiment with things I do for working or things I do for myself.
If I cannot trust the fact Linux is there since ever and every related OS is using some rootfs structure that worked without problems untile now, I don't want to find that everything that was using that structure won't work anymore because of some decision that is not practically friendly with any user in the community since it's not compatible with the single package manager the community is using ... I mean .. seriously ... WTF!!!

Just A Haughty Community ?

Worst part is that I was going to humbly open a post in your forum then I've realized to do that I have to register and answer this question in order to do that:
What is the output of "date -u +%V$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?
I've never seen anything dumber that that .. first of all, if that's because a possible robot, most likely runs over Linux and is able to simulate the question wrapped in quotes and produce automatic result, if this was an idiotic robot attempt, secondly because the moment I want register to the forum is probably because one of your community "hackers" did such dumb mistake that I cannot even test my ArchLinux machine anymore ... so, whoever thought that was a good way to welcome your forum members, has a very regular IQ, if not lower than that.

Focus On Something Else

The moment a community with a vibrant and excellent product as ArchLinux is starts wasting everybody time behind these philosophical changes that break everything in facts is the moment the community needs to breath 5 minutes and think what the hell is going on and what's really needed to make the community better instead of pissing everybody off about some decision that no matter if was OK and right, it should NOT have broken all users around that were trusting the package manager to simply work as explained and emphasized everywhere on the WEB
Apologies for the rant but ... bloody hell, I've got all my boards screwed because of this "little change" in the whole OS.

Even Dumber

The page that is telling us how to update things is suggesting
# pacman -Syu --ignore filesystem,bash
# pacman -S bash
# pacman -Su
... too bad the current latest updated pacman cannot be installed without the updated bash too ... congratulations!

2 comments:

x said...

Oh Andrea, noone told you this is how rolling releases go? I used to love Gentoo back in the days, then jumped to Ubuntu, Debian, and finally Arch for a year or so and yes, Arch do break sometimes (nowdays I'm on Windows, but could work with both, not a big deal).

Communitywise their wiki is extraordinary, people are not so; now they are pretty low, mostly elitist kids bragging about how Arch is superior to every other distro out there, but this happened to Gentoo too (with more quarrels and corruption around the board).

So, what's the conclusion? I don't know. For ancient crap (including my media player netbook) I use Debian, should I need more, I probably would by a Mac, that's pretty popular nowdays with frontend devs.

Rmax said...

I must admit that the last time I use Arch satisfied, my laptop (Toshiba M645) worked like never before with this distribution, then spend time with Windows 8 and when I try to re-Arch think I found those problems you mention, is a shame because right now I have ubuntu but not the same. I have hopes that Arch again be a little more stable and make the installer more enjoyable or at least the last time I met him was a step by step