DVCS

[Jeff Nowakowski]

On 01/20/2011 07:33 AM, Gour wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:39:08 -0500
> Jeff Nowakowski<jeff at dilacero.org>  wrote:
>
>
>> No, I haven't tried it. I'm not going to try every OS that comes down
>> the pike.
>
> Then please, without any offense, do not give advises about something
> which you did not try. I did use Ubuntu...

Please yourself. I quoted from the FAQ from the distribution's main 
site. If that's wrong, then Arch has a big public relations problem. I 
can make rational arguments without having used a system.

>> That's a heavy investment of time, especially for somebody
>> unfamiliar with Linux.
>
> Again, you're speaking without personal experience...

 From Jonathan M Davis in this thread:

"There is no question that Arch takes more to manage than a number of 
other distros. [..] Arch really doesn't take all that much to maintain, 
but it does have a higher setup cost than your average distro, and you 
do have to do some level of manual configuration that I'd expect a more 
typical distro like OpenSuSE or Ubuntu to take care of for you."


> Moreover, in TDPL's foreword, Walter speaks about himself as "..of an
> engineer..", so I'm sure he is capable to handle The Arch Way

You're talking about somebody who is running a nearly 3 year old version 
of Ubuntu because he had one bad upgrade experience, and is probably 
running software full of security holes. If he can't spend a day a year 
to upgrade his OS, what makes you think he wants to spend time on a more 
demanding distro?

> There are no incompatibilities...if I upgrade kernel, it means that
> package manager will figure out what components has to be updated...

And what happens when the kernel, as it often does, changes the way it 
handles things like devices, and expects the administrator to do some 
tweaking to handle the upgrade? What happens when you upgrade X and it 
no longer supports your video chipset? What happens when you upgrade 
something as basic as the DNS library, and it reacts badly with your router?

Is Arch going to maintain your config files for you? Is it going to 
handle jumping 2 or 3 versions for software that can only upgrade from 
one version ago?

These are real world examples. Arch is not some magic distribution that 
will make upgrade problems go away.

> Remember: there are no packages 'tagged' for any specific release!

Yeah, I know. I also run Debian Testing, which is a "rolling release". 
I'm not some Ubuntu noob.