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#1 2004-01-03 01:47:28

mavric
Member
From: B.C. Canada
Registered: 2004-01-03
Posts: 24

Arch = beta?

Would you consider arch to be beta at the moment? What needs to be done for it to be Arch 1.0?

Aside from upgraded pakages, what will differentiate 0.5 from 0.6? (in other words, should I install arch now, or wait)

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#2 2004-01-03 02:28:14

contrasutra
Member
From: New Jersey
Registered: 2003-07-26
Posts: 507

Re: Arch = beta?

Half the apps in Linux are beta. Hell, WINE's been alpha for 10 years.

Should you use Arch? Of course.


"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern technology.  Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."

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#3 2004-01-03 03:23:29

dp
Member
From: Zürich, Switzerland
Registered: 2003-05-27
Posts: 3,378
Website

Re: Arch = beta?

WINE is not stable ... never use it in important things, it will crash your win32-tools sooner or later --- but this has also to do with the code it must interpret and run wink


but arch is stable!!  ... i use it on my laptop for quite everything

>>>> WARNING <<<<

the only problem with arch happens, when you upgrade important packages like xfree86 or kernel and do not read the news on www.archlinux.org ... then you can loose in worst case half an hour to find out what you did wrong

>>>> WARNING <<<<


i would say, arch is stable, but why has something to be 1.x to be stable? 1.x means for me, it is mature, and that means a lot of people used it over a long time ... emacs is mature, 2.2.x-kernel is mature, 2.4.x-kernel is becoming mature in this year :-) ... but after only about 2 years, a distro cannot be mature --- i think in the end of 2004 arch (if it still exists, and i hope it does), it will become slowly mature and gains a 1 instead of 0 in front of the first dot wink


The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.

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#4 2004-01-03 05:41:12

RdsArts
Member
Registered: 2003-10-17
Posts: 32

Re: Arch = beta?

Install now.

What are you waiting for, I said now!

Really, to get to 1.0, most of what needs to be done (as far as I can see) is to just get Pacman and the various base stuffs ultra-rock-solid.

And merge in some things from the TURs. wink

.... And bump FreeType2 back to 2.1.5. :twisted:

But really, it's pretty stable for a cutting-edge distro. Heck, it's stable for a stable distro.

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#5 2004-01-03 12:26:47

drivingmsjuki
Member
From: Massachusetts
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 21

Re: Arch = beta?

I concur .. just install now.

After the IT guys at work got some quality persuading, they let me change the office computer from RedHat to Arch last week. The last issues were an older libstdc++ needed for our terminal emulator, and making it talk to the network print queues on the *n*x server - and both those things got mentioned in the workstation forum.

Arch is wonderfully stable already, and its selection of kernel / utitilies / apps doesn't mean that it's particularly "beta" compared to anything else. I'm very pleased to have it on my daily-use station at work now too. smile

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#6 2004-01-03 18:27:27

pjmattal
Forum Fellow
From: Boston, MA
Registered: 2003-12-24
Posts: 40

Re: Arch = beta?

Amen to all the stability "yea"s for Arch.

I had been using RedHat as my Linux distro, both for managing the systems for my office and for myself, for the past 10 or so years. My patience for RedHat finally was lost after a RedHat Network update to a Redhat 7.1 box fried my installation of Apache so badly that there was no graceful way to recover. I've been constantly on the cutting-edge of "current" and "extra" repositories with Arch, and have never experienced anything BUT stability. Furthermore, the ability to do a micro-install of Arch (i.e. just the base) is far better than anything RedHat could offer for small installs.

From a security standpoint, I'm also convinced that by staying cutting-edge on updates for packages, this is truly the best way to remain secure AND compatible. To "stay behind" for stability usually ends up getting you in trouble eventually.. it's better to work out the stability issues in small drips and drabs as you upgrade packages, rather than have to figure out all the things that changed between, say, Postgres 7.2 and Postgres 7.4.1.

Can I also say that my RPM databases would from time to time hang and have to be rebuilt on RedHat!! Pacman is a quality product which would never have such issues. It's based on simple things that it's easy to get right, and easy to figure out if they go wrong.

I'm planning to deploy an Arch server running 2.6 as a 1.7TB fileserver sometime in the next month. I'm convinced!

- P

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