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#1 2013-06-14 05:41:12

dirtime
Member
Registered: 2009-07-17
Posts: 4

[SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

I know that it can be difficult to upgrade after a long (1-4 month) period with no upgrades.

But sometimes I need to be away from one of my destkop installs for several months at a time, and am not always able to upgrade remotely as frequently as I should.

1) Is there a known way to do something in advance to ease the pain of upgrading an arch install after a couple of months?  And if not:

2) Does the idea below make sense as a way of doing so?---

Have the unattended machine each week download (but not install) a kind of "partial upgrade snapshot", using something like

pacman -Syu --downloadonly

(and also have it save a copy of the sync database each week).

Then when I return to the machine, rather than doing a single giant upgrade, I would upgrade incrementally snapshot-by-snapshot, hopefully simulating what would have happened if the machine had been upgraded every week.

Does this idea make sense?  If so, is it correct that the only things that would need to be saved each week are the updated package files and a snapshot of the sync database?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Last edited by dirtime (2013-06-16 00:31:54)

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#2 2013-06-14 06:22:49

Jristz
Member
From: America/Santiago
Registered: 2011-06-11
Posts: 1,022

Re: [SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

you can use ARM (arch Rollback Machine) repos and point to month, this can take more internet broadwidht/band/whatever but is a little more safe tha a 'in one shoot' upgrade
other think can by upgrade as son as posssible if a new is on the main page

really Arch isnot designed for a 'wait until i can even if this is years on the future' update model


Well, I suppose that this is somekind of signature, no?

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#3 2013-06-14 06:58:25

FreeTheBee
Member
Registered: 2011-01-02
Posts: 125

Re: [SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

I had to do such an upgrade last year, because I first I had no access to my pc for about a month and then no internet for another one. I just read the news from the previous weeks, followed instructions and hoped for the best. In the end the update went fine, but the then current kernel had a bug, which made my system unbootable. This would have bitten me in the behind anyway, but finding the cause was a bit more tricky (for me), because my whole system was basically changed.

If such updates are kind of a regular thing, I would consider using a more conservative distro.

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#4 2013-06-14 07:04:16

David Batson
Member
Registered: 2011-10-13
Posts: 640

Re: [SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

Read the Home page (button at top of forum) for any major upgrade 'gotchas'.  I also copy and paste the terminal output from the upgrade to a text file for further review after the upgrade.  Read through the text file for any other issues that should be addressed.

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#5 2013-06-14 10:17:51

Mr.Elendig
#archlinux@freenode channel op
From: The intertubes
Registered: 2004-11-07
Posts: 4,092

Re: [SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

dirtime wrote:

Wall of text

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57205

And your suggestion will probably just cause more work than it is worth. Just read the news since the last time you updated, and pay close attention to pacman.


Evil #archlinux@libera.chat channel op and general support dude.
. files on github, Screenshots, Random pics and the rest

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#6 2013-06-16 00:31:30

dirtime
Member
Registered: 2009-07-17
Posts: 4

Re: [SOLVED] No upgrades for several months: plan ahead to ease the pain?

Thanks very much to those who replied.  I am marking this thread solved.

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