Current path of Arch scaring me

vacant · 2006-02-26 15:40:51

Mr.Elendig wrote:

it woud be nice if there was a warning in packman whenever it's a major upgrade

Yes, I run an additional Arch partition syncing with the test repo but even though Arch is a distro for the more experienced Linux user, we can't expect everyone to have the time to play with "test" before upgrading their live system.

edit: maybe a cryptic message from pacman such as 'I am just going outside and may be some time.'

codemac · 2006-02-27 00:24:27

[Y/n] is good enough for me :-P

Dusty · 2006-02-27 01:19:13

There's another issue here... the recent migration from testing included a whole pile of packages... to me, it seemed very much like making a monolithic release -- what's happened to the rolling release system? We could argue that it happened around xorg, a lot of packages depended on the changes that happened there and a lot of testing required.... only, the stuff that happened in testing doesn't seem to have made a difference, we still had a lot of breaks after the release. How come these weren't caught by the people using it from testing?

Dusty

ozar · 2006-02-27 01:50:45

Dusty wrote:

only, the stuff that happened in testing doesn't seem to have made a difference, we still had a lot of breaks after the release. How come these weren't caught by the people using it from testing?
Dusty

Good point, Dusty.

I don't use the testing repo at all, but do remember seeing quite a few posts about xorg7 at the time from those that do. Even with all the testing that was done, the breakage caused by xorg7 was still the largest I've ever seen under Arch, and new threads from suffering users continue to come.

Perhaps it was "testing" that was broken, and not xorg7.

oz

iphitus · 2006-02-27 07:03:49

xorg7 has been trouble, and on the days after it, the mirroring problems amplified it. A message might best have been posted on how to deal with it, but alas, us devs are human and we do make mistakes.

Some of the problems with xorg7 are just simple things. But it was sitting in testing for a long time before being moved. We're devs, not devs+test on every box under the sun people. It's a problem that we know about.

Judd is looking to start up a testing team. He mentioned it in his interview with TLLTS. If you're interested, email him.

Quite a few problems with Xorg7 have been ATI related. ATI's drivers simply suck with Xorg7 anyway, they havnt been updated, and we have to use countless hacks to make them work. One such is a symlink, which I cannot install with the package, as most systems would still have files in /usr/X11R6. I tell users this in the post install. But nobody reads the post install messages

The other problem problem with ATI, is that simply, no devs want to maintain that package - as none of them have ATI cards. I was the crazy one who chose to upload ATI to the repos so that the users could have their ATI, despite not even owning an ATI card myself, nor can I afford one. I'd love to test it myself, but I simply cant, I'll find a user to test it for me at the best of times.

A simple solution for those scared of their system breaking on an update. Wait a few days. It's usually well announced on the homepage when a major update comes through. So it's not difficult to wait a few days for the dust to settle so you can update, armed with the knowledge of what's happened to others. It's not ideal, but without people testing....... what more can you, or us devs do?

initramfs/initrd. I hate them too. But it's the best solution. Most distros use them, but contain their own work-for-everyone initramfs that just seems to always work. So I guess we currently, dont have the greatest implementation. Sure, it's good, and it works, but people hate it, and theres room for it to work better. It could be made more 'Arch, Simple'. Phrakture's working on a much better way of dealing with it that should be exactly that. And much cooler.

Dusty: There wasnt much that could be done about making xorg7 a rolling change. Simply, updating any packages that used X or hardcoded path's to X, would break most of them. Rolling X in, would be rolling bugs and breaks in. It had to be moved in one go, 'monolithic' as you called it. As ozar mentioned, some problems were found, but the devs only know if the bugs are filed. Arch's devs are volunteers, and do not have the time to read all the forums. It can consume quite a bit of time....

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

iphitus

ps, random plea from me as a dev: Please read post install messages, redirect pacman's output out to a file so you can review the messages after the install. It's frustrating dealing with problems on the forums, that we're mentioned specifically in the post install.

Romashka · 2006-02-27 07:51:28

I'm using [testing] and have no big problems with Xorg7 except xdm (fixed now) and xfce4-xkbswitch (broken after xkbdata -> xkeyboard-config transition). Oh, and the latest bftpd-1.2-1 has no binaries. :-)
Before doing any update I do a quick check of main site and packages repository. I also watch for changes in CVS for packages that I'm interested.
Of course some changes casuses some troubles, but allmost all of them can be avoided if user reads news. Some notification in pacman would be usefull though.

neotuli · 2006-02-27 13:12:07

Romashka wrote:

Some notification in pacman would be usefull though.

It's not terribly uncommon to use post_install() messages for bigger things, effectively making pacman do this.

Romashka · 2006-02-27 13:40:43

neotuli wrote:

It's not terribly uncommon to use post_install() messages for bigger things, effectively making pacman do this.

I agree, but in which package should be notices about the latest xorg upgrade?
It would be good to have simple alert in Pacman like "Check Arch Linux website for important news about upgrade to Xorg7" or

Do the following to upgrade to Xorg7:
  pacman -Sy
  pacman -Rd xorg-server xorg-clients
  pacman -Sf xorg-xdm
  pacman -S xorg-clients xorg-server
  pacman -Su

Well, it would be even better if Pacman could handle such complex upgrades as this without any workarounds, with just simple pacman -S. Then post_install/post_upgrade message would be enough.

hypermegachi · 2006-02-27 14:42:58

i think there needs to be a mechanism that displays this information prior to any install.

it's not all that useful to say "oh by the way, this is how you get xorg working" when pacman already installed it.

btw, when i used xorg in testing it was flawless, so i'm pretty sure the mirror syncs were the primary cause of the problem (cuz 2 days later pacman -S brought on like 200 megs of upgrades, and it worked thereafter)

slackhack · 2006-02-27 16:26:08

udev: like it
initrd: have no use for it
xorg 7: mostly okay. the matrox mga drivers no longer work for me, though, requiring me to use vesa, and the functioning of some apps got messed up (plugins in ff, etc.) it would have been better if that had been held back until it was a little more mature, imho.

as for notifications, check out this latest one:

upgrading hwd... done.
Run 'hwd -u' to update pci, usb, and pcmcia tables.

[2] root:/home/sero # hwd -u
This will download latest pci/usb/pcmcia tables.
Are you connected and ready to download (y/n)? [n] y
Please wait....
pci usb pcimcia
pcitable    -->ok
usbtable    -->ok
pcmciatable -->ok

how cool is that?

Spider.007 · 2006-02-27 16:54:14

I wouldn't like my packagemanager to function as some sort of RSS feed-reader. Yes, Xorg7 broke stuff; and lots of people asked questions that were already answered on the wiki. But I don't think this is a problem pacman should solve.

Maybe moving up the news-section on the archlinux would help in making news easily findable and readable

Mr.Elendig · 2006-02-27 16:58:49

neotuli wrote:

Romashka wrote:
Some notification in pacman would be usefull though.
It's not terribly uncommon to use post_install() messages for bigger things, effectively making pacman do this.

A pre_install() woud be even better.

example:

pacman -Syu
Targets: zaptel-1.2.4-1 asterisk-1.2.4-4 ivtv-0.4.3-1 kdelibs-3.5.1-2 kdemultimedia-3.5.1-4 openoffice-base-2.0.2-1 vlc-0.8.4a-4
         xmms-1.2.10-6
Proceed with upgrade? [Y/n] y
Downloading bhla bhla bhla
Installing bhla bhla bhla
Warning; kdelibs-3.5.1-2 will mess upp your system,, and tie knots on all the cables behind the computer. (http://wiki.archlinux.org/omfgkdelibswikipage)
Do you want to continue? [y/N] y

nuopus · 2006-02-27 18:39:08

Well I had two reactions to those topics. My first one was:

1. Migration to udev - "Why the hell would I want to tell udev HOW to create my custom devices when I could just create them manually have have it be the end of it."

2. Migration to initrd - "Great ... this will lead to un-necessary modules being loaded and be more complicated to configure. I hope my system boots again after this!"

3. Migration to xorg 7 - "As long as ATI drivers work and I can play World of Warcraft I care not."

So my initial reaction to those topics were not so good, but I dealt with them. After working with each for a couple of weeks my outlook on each of the topics is now:

1. Migration to udev - "Okay now this is what i'm talking about. It's managing my devices nicely, I have a clean /dev and its not that hard to just add a new entry if I need it. This is awesome!"

2. Migration to initrd - "The Arch devs did a really good job on their mkinitrd scripts. I can customize what gets loaded overall, and my kernel is tighter. This is awesome!"

3. Migration to xorg 7 - "I can play World of Warcraft and the person that wrote the pkgbuild for it is awesome. This is the new xorg release and other distros will follow suite so the change has to happen some time. This is awesome!"

Its all been good to me. I figure there will be lots of complaints due to a lack of understanding. But you just have to open your mind and learn the new method of doing things instead of jumping the gun and telling the world how the features suck.

I have full faith in the developers of this fine distribution. Don't you?

iphitus · 2006-02-27 23:04:15

nuopus wrote:

Its all been good to me. I figure there will be lots of complaints due to a lack of understanding. But you just have to open your mind and learn the new method of doing things instead of jumping the gun and telling the world how the features suck.
I have full faith in the developers of this fine distribution. Don't you?

Course I do! Err, well I am one

As for the various install message suggestions. There already is the option for a pre-install message. However providing an option requiring user input is not usually permitted in these as it breaks any setup that anyone uses to automatically install packages.

There's already post-install messages for a lot of things, but nobody reads them.

I might get around to making a patch to make pacman echo post install messages out after installing everything. Then they at least dont get lost in the mess of installing xyz package.

iphitus

hypermegachi · 2006-02-27 23:28:30

iphitus wrote:

As for the various install message suggestions. There already is the option for a pre-install message. However providing an option requiring user input is not usually permitted in these as it breaks any setup that anyone uses to automatically install packages.

why not add an extra command to -S to ignore those messages/warnings and install anyway? i still think it's a bad idea to tell the user after the package is installed. sometimes downgrading isn't so easy...

nuopus · 2006-02-28 03:24:33

iphitus wrote:

nuopus wrote:
Its all been good to me. I figure there will be lots of complaints due to a lack of understanding. But you just have to open your mind and learn the new method of doing things instead of jumping the gun and telling the world how the features suck.
I have full faith in the developers of this fine distribution. Don't you?
Course I do! Err, well I am one
As for the various install message suggestions. There already is the option for a pre-install message. However providing an option requiring user input is not usually permitted in these as it breaks any setup that anyone uses to automatically install packages.
There's already post-install messages for a lot of things, but nobody reads them.
I might get around to making a patch to make pacman echo post install messages out after installing everything. Then they at least dont get lost in the mess of installing xyz package.
iphitus

Now that would be a very useful feature to pacman. I have always wanted to install a large group of packages and have a report generated with all of the post install outcome. Maybe a --rep installation.log that generates an output similar to what head does when you view multiple files.

Example:

==> installedprogram <==
You may add a declaration in the daemons section if you want this loaded at startup.

==> installedprogram2 <==
Another message (lack of creativity. lol)

This way you don't miss important messages when you specify a large group of packages or miss a message of one of the dependencies. Many a time I see something important fly passed the screen only to find I ran out of buffer room for the scroll up.

Would this be difficult to add? What do you think its usefulness would be? Personally I think this would rock!

raskolnikov · 2006-02-28 11:47:43

Personally, I always use the tee(1) command trough a pipe to see pacman's progress and keep all its messages to a file for reading before rebooting

For the rest, hm... Never liked devfs, udev is fine for me. Don't care for initrd, if it is more versatile then it's the way to go (I plan to reinstall my laptop with encrypted / and swap, may be fun ). Xorg7, well... no problem at all after upgrading this, except the fact that I had to manually install the via unichrome drivers, not a big deal.

BTW, unichrome support in worg7 is very good : now I can use Xv and read movies without -framedrop (on an athlon XP 2600+ lol). If you have unichrome, xorg7 is a must !

Euphoric Nightmare · 2006-02-28 17:06:11

I don't see what the big deal is. None of the things mentioned go against the arch philosophy. I think these are all necessary changes, and i have to admit: xorg7 and udev was well worth the trouble (actually there was no trouble), and initrd posed no problems for me.

Dusty · 2006-02-28 17:24:40

These threads come up every time there's troubles... the devs are doing their best; its up to the users to decide if they want to use the result or not. The nice part is many users also tend to help out by fixing entries in the wiki and such when problems like this come up.

Dusty

timm · 2006-03-01 16:34:00

Now, we just raised a lot of $ for a new server, more than is needed, so when I see:

iphitus wrote:

The other problem problem with ATI, is that simply, no devs want to maintain that package - as none of them have ATI cards. I was the crazy one who chose to upload ATI to the repos so that the users could have their ATI, despite not even owning an ATI card myself, nor can I afford one. I'd love to test it myself, but I simply cant, I'll find a user to test it for me at the best of times.

I wonder if this would be a place for the devs to get together and make an investment in development with some of the overage. (I don't have an ATI card, if it matters)

Kern · 2006-03-01 17:36:41

Sounds like its just growing pains. Some things have to be endured in order to progress.

For me im only too happy that there are ppl up there that commit such significant time and effort into trying new things for the benefit of the distro.
OK it screws my head occasionaly, but isn't this the point of being with a bleeding edge distro. newness, challenge etc?

Kudos to the devs for all their efforts. o7

dtw · 2006-03-01 17:47:00

iphitus wrote:

The other problem problem with ATI, is that simply, no devs want to maintain that package - as none of them have ATI cards. I was the crazy one who chose to upload ATI to the repos so that the users could have their ATI, despite not even owning an ATI card myself, nor can I afford one. I'd love to test it myself, but I simply cant, I'll find a user to test it for me at the best of times.

Hmm, fairly petty I know but it was actually me that added ATI to [community] - there are some serious weaknesses in the Arch Linux "credit" chain some times...

On-topic: I didn't have an ATI card either. It does seem reasonable that the money could buy one for a dev to test stuff on tho!

Cerebral · 2006-03-01 19:02:01

I thought _I_ was the resident ATI tester?

codemac · 2006-03-01 19:11:05

For me, ati just tends to work as intended. fglrx has always worked in about 5 minutes.

The fact that ATI blows when it comes to linux support doesn't help though.

So black mage and red mage have ATI. Ask us.

iphitus · 2006-03-01 23:09:12

dibblethewrecker wrote:

iphitus wrote:
The other problem problem with ATI, is that simply, no devs want to maintain that package - as none of them have ATI cards. I was the crazy one who chose to upload ATI to the repos so that the users could have their ATI, despite not even owning an ATI card myself, nor can I afford one. I'd love to test it myself, but I simply cant, I'll find a user to test it for me at the best of times.
Hmm, fairly petty I know but it was actually me that added ATI to [community] - there are some serious weaknesses in the Arch Linux "credit" chain some times...
On-topic: I didn't have an ATI card either. It does seem reasonable that the money could buy one for a dev to test stuff on tho!

Sorry dibble. In saying that i meant the Arch main repos, extra etc.

This is the open source community. You wont always get credit. Just be happy in the knowledge that someone is using something that you wrote and initiated. Anything else is bonus.

You cant expect someone to say " I use python for this, (thanks the developers, Guido, bob, joe, alex, sarah, james, paul and the Arch devs for packaging it, and the python release team for releasing it. etc)."

iphitus

Arch Linux

#26 2006-02-26 15:40:51

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#27 2006-02-27 00:24:27

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#28 2006-02-27 01:19:13

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#29 2006-02-27 01:50:45

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#30 2006-02-27 07:03:49

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#31 2006-02-27 07:51:28

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#32 2006-02-27 13:12:07

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#33 2006-02-27 13:40:43

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#34 2006-02-27 14:42:58

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#35 2006-02-27 16:26:08

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#36 2006-02-27 16:54:14

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#37 2006-02-27 16:58:49

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#38 2006-02-27 18:39:08

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#39 2006-02-27 23:04:15

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#40 2006-02-27 23:28:30

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#41 2006-02-28 03:24:33

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#42 2006-02-28 11:47:43

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#43 2006-02-28 17:06:11

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#44 2006-02-28 17:24:40

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#45 2006-03-01 16:34:00

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#46 2006-03-01 17:36:41

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#47 2006-03-01 17:47:00

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#48 2006-03-01 19:02:01

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#49 2006-03-01 19:11:05

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

#50 2006-03-01 23:09:12

Re: Current path of Arch scaring me

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