Package quality

wooptoo · 2007-07-24 02:27:12

I've been using ArchLinux since "Gimmick" and I liked it a lot (at least in the beginning): nice community and developers, great package management, very easy to build packages, rc.conf kicks ass and all that.

But since "Duke" came out all hell broke loose. A lot of packages break after pacman -Syu. This month alone I had problems with udev, fontconfig, curl, wine, nautilus, gnome 2.18. Curl was fixed quite fast, wine broke because of wine's developers, so it's not Arch's fault here, but udev and fontconfig are still broke. I can't use my camera and my collection of fonts. I don't use gnome and nautilus anymore (so they might be a little bit better now) but after the upgrade from 2.16 to 2.18 it became very unstable and buggy.

Bottom line... is there any chance that the packages in "current" be tested more rigorously? It seems to me that Arch developers are more concerned with getting the latest(-and-not-always-the-greatest) versions of the packages in the repositories, than testing them for stability.
If things keep going this way, we are going to have useless systems pretty soon (mine is half-useless already).
I would prefer the "current" packages to be as outdated as "stable" on Debian are, than the way they are now.
Are there not enough developers working on Arch? or what is the real problem?
Arch is gaining a lot of users and popularity. Many people left Gentoo, Debian, Slackware or whatever for this distro, so having problems like these is a real turn-off.

I didn't want this to sound like a rant/whine or whatever, but I really hoped that Arch would put an end to the hunt for the perfect distro, because it looked very very promising in the beginning.

Last edited by wooptoo (2007-07-24 02:31:20)

elliott · 2007-07-24 03:29:33

Am I the only one whose system has never really broken from a "pacman -Syu"? I've had little things go wrong, but nothing that wasn't easily fixable. I think I have only had to downgrade packages about 2-3 times since I started using Arch.

Last edited by elliott (2007-07-24 03:30:37)

High|ander · 2007-07-24 04:00:12

Same here, have never downgraded a package yet. Only problems that i have notice was then using "testing" repo, but thats fine with me

A.I. BOT · 2007-07-24 04:38:18

Some people get a bad apple I guess. I have never had a problem either.

PDExperiment626 · 2007-07-24 05:02:48

I too have never had issues with a pacman -Syu. That being said, I HAVE had issue when things like gconf got upgraded. This is an issue with gnome changing certain configuration tags etc. My gconf problem propagated to many many other issues.

In my experience, the packages on the standard repositories have always been stable. The Arch developers don't seem to have an issue with keeping a package in testing for prolonged amounts of time (look at how long X.org 1.3.0.0 has been in there).

My suggestions are to first make sure your not using any packages from the testing repo. Then try to use your system with a newly created user and see if you still have the same issues you were having before. An out-dated config file can reek havoc on your machine, believe me; and a new user should have all properly formated config files in their home directory. If you still have problems, start rolling back your last package upgrade. All binaries of every package you've installed are in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/. So, look at your /var/log/pacman.log and use that to guide your rollback. This will enable you to track down the problem package and from there you can hopefully figure out exactly what's going on. This is assuming, of course, that you don't keep cleaning out /var/cache/pacman/pkg with pacman -Sc(c) on a regular basis (which isn't a good idea until you know your current package set works well).

mitsoko · 2007-07-24 05:18:59

elliott wrote:

Am I the only one whose system has never really broken from a "pacman -Syu"? I've had little things go wrong, but nothing that wasn't easily fixable. I think I have only had to downgrade packages about 2-3 times since I started using Arch.

i guess we are freaks in this together lol

Mikko777 · 2007-07-24 09:56:59

Well, I kinda agree with the original poster

Nothing major though, just some small undocumented = no warnings bugs / incompatibilities.
Probably most of those haven't been Arch's fault tho.

And I do have lots of weird stuff installed from repos and aur.

So aslong as theres no major breakdows without warning im happy.
Altough its damn annoying to tweak something to perfection just to be demolished by some lib or dep upgrade.

Nonworking obconf with openbox comes to mind as latest example.

mucknert · 2007-07-24 10:21:17

Another one who never had a problem here. Mostly, problems arise from upstream-changes that are not the fault of the Arch-Devs and is some serious stuff is dropping in (like a big move from testing to current), you get a notification. I've always checked back with the Homepage or the BBS before any big upgrade and that always works perfectly. Can't relate to the OP.
Oh, and I am on Arch since Widget, by the way. And I still have to see am major fuckup that wasn't my own damn fault. Regular upgrades with some information in advance always worked best for me.

evol · 2007-07-24 10:40:08

Actually, I suffered my first problem with the packaging today. Got boinc from the repository and when I tried to run boinc-client/cmd I got:

boinc_cmd: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Curl is installed and I have /usr/lib/libcurl.so & /usr/lib/libcurl.so4

A bit of editing and messing around on the way

Last edited by evol (2007-07-24 10:42:35)

Lone_Wolf · 2007-07-24 11:02:32

@ evol : the current curl 7.16.4-1 uses libcurl.so.4 , so boinc probalby needs to rebuild against the latest version.
As it's an aur community package , i suggest you flag it out-of-date with a comment and/or rebuild it yourself.

Apart from a kernel related problem with my laptop since kernel 2.6.21 (and that problem is not arch-related) i've only had minor problems that were solved within 2 days max.

The last problem i had with udev turned out to be a malfunctioning dvd-burner, NOT udev.
I use KDE so i can't comment on gnome/nautilus, but i've had no problems with fontconfig in a long time.
It's been a long time that i had problems with kde.
I also use wine and have to say that IMO wine is in late alpha stage. It's getting better, but to many apps work with a specific 0.9.xx version and not with later ones. This however is caused by the wine developers, not by arch devs.
The only wine version that's really stable is the older one used in Crossover Office.

nikron · 2007-07-24 11:15:28

I've never actually had a broken pacman -Syu. That being said, I've had a few problems with pacman. The most annoying one being have having to pacman -S perl everytime a perl package gets installed.

Last edited by nikron (2007-07-24 11:18:25)

iphitus · 2007-07-24 11:47:48

Likewise, no broken syu's here. Most of the time if people are complaining about a broken Syu, it's something they've done -- usually coincidentally. Regardless, if you do have a broken Syu, please report it on the bug tracker. Arch dev's do not have telepathy, and while we do what testing we can, it's inevitable that bugs slip through.

But to say we don't care about testing and stability is... short sighted and ignorant. Maybe take a look at the arch-dev-public mailing list and see exactly what we talk about. Stability has been our primary concern of the last 6 months and we've been working on new ways to improve it.

James

kishd · 2007-07-24 12:00:34

Can't remember if an Syu broke my system. Last big problem I had was when I did not rtfm and my devices changed from hdx to sdx. I run testing and have yet to have an Syu break my system. Arch is rock solid and usually if anything goes wrong it can be fixed without a re-install. I have used Mandriva, Suse, Fedora and Ubuntu. Many times I had to re-install Ubuntu because some obscure settings were changed during a round of installing testing and removing software. Never had to re-install Arch.

chicha · 2007-07-24 12:08:18

You have this kind of problem with any distribution which choose to have packages almost up-to-date in its 'current' branch.
I had those problems with Ubuntu, with Gentoo and Debian Unstable.

For me there is no way to avoid problems such as kernel modules recompilation, package broken by an update etc ... unless having a hudge and competent community of testers which no distro have today (even Ubuntu).

More ever, is Arch going to decide whether the new stable version of gnumeric (for instance) is enougth stable on Arch's point of view ? With the amount of package it is impossible, and we have to trust the developpers of all our packages.

Anyway you still can have a stable distro if you are carrefull when you perform a package update.
For instance I wait several days before upgrading critical package (kernel, kernel modules, pacman, libc, gcc, libstdc++, binutils ...). I always have a look at the forum to see if some problems are reported, etc ... With such a way of upgrading I have very few problems.

Anyway, you do not have this kind of problem with a Debian stable but you have to wait for a long time (stability has a cost) if you want a new version with new nice feature of an application.

All this is a matter of choice. And if you use Arch you were enought warned I think.

Despite all this I think Arch is very stable compared to its 'blending edgyness' (I do not know if it is english but it sounds a good expression too me )

Cheers,
Chicha

RobbeR49 · 2007-07-24 14:27:38

I can relate somewhat with the frustration as I am having the same problem with udev, but from my experience stability problems are very rare on Arch. I've encountered some upstream problems with packages here and there, and a few misconfigurations sometimes, but so far I've never had an actual stability problem that I could blame on Arch itself. Everything seems about as rock-solid and well tested as it can get, especially considering how bleeding edge the packages are.

As far as the udev issue even though it has yet to be resolved I am already assuming it was some upstream change that caused it and there isn't a whole lot the arch devs can do until it gets fixed by the udev people. It has only been a minor annoyance anyway because it is easy to downgrade udev or use PTP mode on my camera.

Ultimately Arch can't be all things to all people, and if you want the stability of a Debian or a Slackware you're going to have to accept having some very outdated packages on your machine. If you want to have the latest and greatest then you may have to deal with something breaking once in a while. Arch has always leaned towards keeping things as up to date as possible, and overall I would say the devs have done a pretty fine job keeping things stable in spite of the constant barrage of new and updated packages.

ralvez · 2007-07-24 14:43:29

Like most of the people that posted here I have had minor problems with pacman -Syu.
Having said that, given the complexities of an OS like ArchLinux one must expect some difficulties here and there.
If you take into consideration the millions of $$ that Microsoft pours into its OS and the number of problems they have, Arch is doing extremely well
I do empathize with wooptoo, since it seems that computers alway brake what we just happen to need that day or use more often ... those evil things!
On the bright side wooptoo you have an entire community to help you troubleshoot, so if we can help just start posting ;-)

R.

Last edited by ralvez (2007-07-24 14:43:59)

brain0 · 2007-07-24 16:25:46

wooptoo wrote:

But since "Duke" came out all hell broke loose. A lot of packages break after pacman -Syu. This month alone I had problems with udev, fontconfig, curl, wine, nautilus, gnome 2.18. Curl was fixed quite fast, wine broke because of wine's developers, so it's not Arch's fault here, but udev and fontconfig are still broke. I can't use my camera and my collection of fonts. I don't use gnome and nautilus anymore (so they might be a little bit better now) but after the upgrade from 2.16 to 2.18 it became very unstable and buggy.
Bottom line... is there any chance that the packages in "current" be tested more rigorously? It seems to me that Arch developers are more concerned with getting the latest(-and-not-always-the-greatest) versions of the packages in the repositories, than testing them for stability.
If things keep going this way, we are going to have useless systems pretty soon (mine is half-useless already).

Can you post links to the bug reports you opened regarding these issues?

I can only speak for udev here, we have some problems with speed apparently, but it doesn't seem broken to me at all.

RobbeR49 · 2007-07-24 16:40:23

brain0: the udev bug report is here

I don't know about the others.

funkyou · 2007-07-24 17:18:49

Until now i only experienced 2-3 packages which were not packaged properly... All of them were fixed instantly...

IMHO most breakage comes from the apps etc itself. k3b for example was broken lately, and the dev fixed it quite fast

kishd · 2007-07-24 18:48:12

wooptoo, just wondering. Recently pacman 3.0.5 (I think) had a problem with permissions on symlinks. Perhaps some of your problems are related to incorrect permissions and not to the packaging. Perhaps checking in the pacman log and re-installing the programs that were installed with the problematic version of pacman may help.

edit:
It was pacman 3.0.5-1
Here is the link
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=34412

Last edited by kishd (2007-07-25 04:00:05)

wooptoo · 2007-07-24 18:59:06

brain0:
udev: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7568
fontconfig: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7648

I didn't want to post links to the bug reports because it could have been interpreted like blackmail or something: "fix this bug for me or I'm leaving". I was just making a few observations about Arch. Maybe these bugs will get fixed but more will come and will surely break other folks' systems.

iphitus wrote:

But to say we don't care about testing and stability is... short sighted and ignorant. Maybe take a look at the arch-dev-public mailing list and see exactly what we talk about. Stability has been our primary concern of the last 6 months and we've been working on new ways to improve it.

Ok... I never looked over arch-dev-public, my bad, but I do trust you. It's just that packages seem to break more often lately than they did before, and all I do is the nightly pacman -Syu, when the mirror i use synchronizes. It's what I used to do before and never had so many problems.

Regarding the udev issue, i discovered phraktured's mirror, and it has udev-111. Will try it now.
http://phraktured.net/archmirror/
Also, thanks Lone_wolf for the suggestion on the bug tracking page.

edit: kishd: ok, will try that too, thanks.

edit2: ok, it works fine with udev-111

edit 2.1 : brain0: yes, udev-111 seems to be faster than 113.

Last edited by wooptoo (2007-07-24 19:24:22)

_Pi · 2007-12-10 07:08:22

Not to be disrespectful or anything, but who let the noob compile the new set of updates? I just updated and udev went batshit. Right after the update I tried to mount something mount gave me a seg fault. Right now i"m locked out of my system cause it pretty much seg faults on the Loading Udev Devices. No warning just random array of hex output, & errors. Can't even control alt del to call rc.shutdown. It's a definite hard crash right there, however when I do do Ctrl Alt Del it spits out something about acpi triggers.

iphitus · 2007-12-10 07:47:07

_Pi wrote:

Not to be disrespectful or anything, but who let the noob compile the new set of updates? I just updated and udev went batshit. Right after the update I tried to mount something mount gave me a seg fault. Right now i"m locked out of my system cause it pretty much seg faults on the Loading Udev Devices. No warning just random array of hex output, & errors. Can't even control alt del to call rc.shutdown. It's a definite hard crash right there, however when I do do Ctrl Alt Del it spits out something about acpi triggers.

Prefixing a tirade with "not to be disrespectful" doesnt make it any less disrespectful. Instead of bitching on the forums, do something productive and file a bug at http://bugs.archlinux.org

Arch Linux

#1 2007-07-24 02:27:12

Package quality

#2 2007-07-24 03:29:33

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#3 2007-07-24 04:00:12

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