Longest to go without upgrade?

thrashrokz33 · 2013-10-31 05:50:03

What is the longest amount of time one should wait before upgrading? I'd like to refrain from breaking my install for the next 2 months because of school / work. Would waiting this long between upgrades be a bad idea? I'm used to doing weekly updates, and am curious what sorts of problems I'd run into doing this, other than having slightly out of date software for a couple of months.

Also, would I be able to install the occasional package without upgrading the entire system?

Allan · 2013-10-31 05:52:04

thrashrokz33 wrote:

What is the longest amount of time one should wait before upgrading? I'd like to refrain from breaking my install for the next 2 months because of school / work. Would waiting this long between upgrades be a bad idea? I'm used to doing weekly updates, and am curious what sorts of problems I'd run into doing this, other than having slightly out of date software for a couple of months.

Two months should be fine - I do not see anything major on the horizon.

thrashrokz33 wrote:

Also, would I be able to install the occasional package without upgrading the entire system?

If the package has not been updated in that time, yes. Otherwise, it is a very bad idea.

phanisvara · 2013-10-31 06:24:42

i find it much easier and less stressful to update daily. rarely there's an update that creates problems, usually announced on the website or mailing list. if something should go wrong, there's pacman's cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/), which allows you to switch back to the previous version of any package or package group that causes trouble. doesn't hardly take any time, and larger updates, after months without, are far more likely to do that.

Last edited by phanisvara (2013-10-31 06:26:48)

studentik · 2013-10-31 12:04:32

When pressing final Enter on "sudo pacman -Syu" starts to scare you, it's a signal either to update ASAP or to freeze until future reinstall

w201 · 2013-10-31 17:06:38

I update every Sunday.

hooya · 2013-10-31 17:46:30

phanisvara wrote:

i find it much easier and less stressful to update daily. rarely there's an update that creates problems, usually announced on the website or mailing list. if something should go wrong, there's pacman's cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/), which allows you to switch back to the previous version of any package or package group that causes trouble. doesn't hardly take any time, and larger updates, after months without, are far more likely to do that.

I agree with this sentiment. Make updates daily and you're less likely to seriously break something (fewer packages upgraded at a time) and it's easier to track down any problem because fewer packages are involved.

clfarron4 · 2013-10-31 19:36:41

Allan wrote:

Two months should be fine - I do not see anything major on the horizon.

Of course this may change. In any event, everyone has thrown in what I was going to say.

tandycorp · 2013-10-31 22:14:03

phanisvara wrote:

i find it much easier and less stressful to update daily. rarely there's an update that creates problems, usually announced on the website or mailing list. if something should go wrong, there's pacman's cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/), which allows you to switch back to the previous version of any package or package group that causes trouble. doesn't hardly take any time, and larger updates, after months without, are far more likely to do that.

By the way how do you roll back without noting every single package involved? Is there a script or an easy way? I suppose you use the last modification date of the file?

Last edited by tandycorp (2013-10-31 22:14:58)

karol · 2013-10-31 22:17:33

I don't think any such script exists. You can use ARM's daily snapshots, but it works only for packages from the official repos.

tandycorp · 2013-10-31 22:32:51

karol wrote:

I don't think any such script exists. You can use ARM's daily snapshots, but it works only for packages from the official repos.

Just found 'downgrade' and 'downgrader' in AUR, I installed downgrader which use pacman logs to find the right files to downgrade, pretty nice!

karol · 2013-10-31 22:35:01

There's also Xyne's armh, but they don't work the way e.g. LVM or btrfs snapshots do, you can't easily do "revert to what I had installed 3 days ago".

cfr · 2013-10-31 23:22:02

Why don't you just update e.g. weekly right after doing a backup? (You do backup, right? Especially if you have critical stuff coming up - hard drives die and hardware breaks regardless of what you software is doing.)

nomorewindows · 2013-10-31 23:27:06

On a machine I didn't use for about a year it wanted so many intermediate updates, it was easier to just reinstall from scratch.

tandycorp · 2013-11-01 00:16:02

cfr wrote:

Why don't you just update e.g. weekly right after doing a backup? (You do backup, right? Especially if you have critical stuff coming up - hard drives die and hardware breaks regardless of what you software is doing.)

Good point.

WonderWoofy · 2013-11-01 00:20:10

I am a btrfs user, which makes it incredibly easy to snapshot the system so that I can roll back to a previously known good state. I keep everything except /home and my ESP on one subvolume, so it is as easy as changing the rootflags kernel command line argument before booting.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-10-31 05:50:03

Longest to go without upgrade?

#2 2013-10-31 05:52:04

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#3 2013-10-31 06:24:42

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#4 2013-10-31 12:04:32

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#5 2013-10-31 17:06:38

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#6 2013-10-31 17:46:30

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#7 2013-10-31 19:36:41

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#8 2013-10-31 22:14:03

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#9 2013-10-31 22:17:33

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#10 2013-10-31 22:32:51

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#11 2013-10-31 22:35:01

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#12 2013-10-31 23:22:02

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#13 2013-10-31 23:27:06

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#14 2013-11-01 00:16:02

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

#15 2013-11-01 00:20:10

Re: Longest to go without upgrade?

Board footer