Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 03/08/2014 13:04, Dale wrote: >> >> >> True. I think the official claim is that once a year updates are >> supported. However, we have seen people that wait that long, and >> sometimes not even that long, and encounter a update process that deals >> with two or three deal breakers. I can't recall the package names but I >> know a couple packages can be a hair puller on their own. > icu, libxml, libpng and how can we forget > > <shudder> hal </shudder> > > and of course our recent friends python-exec as well as udev/upower-pm-utils
Oh goodness, you wouldn't mention *THAT* one. :-@ lol Those are the ones I was thinking of tho. Those can be a bit tricky at best. At least they were before. It seems portage handles things better now but why ask for trouble? You know, hal is the only reason, other than smoke coming from a power supply, that I have ever had to actually pull the plug on a puter. Ever. Hitting the rest button, a couple times. Pulling the plug, not for anything outside that smoke issue. I cleaned the power supply with air and a rubber band was caught in the fan. It ran for a bit but got a little toasty at the end. ;-) It seems that fan runs for a good reason. :/ >> When you add >> in two of them at the same time, it gets bad really fast. So you make >> a good point. >> >> That is the reason I wanted to do updates about every week when I was on >> dial-up. I might would go two weeks at times. Now that I have DSL, I >> update usually twice a week. If I am expecting say a upgrade of KDE in >> between, I may add one that week or just shuffle my schedule to make it >> include the KDE upgrades. I have found that the twice a week updates >> are usually easier than the weekly ones when I was on dial-up. The >> improvements in portage could account for some of that but still, >> avoiding having two major changes at the same time is a good idea. The >> devs do seem to try and spread those apart a little anyway. They can't >> hold them forever tho. >> >> While every day may be a bit much, waiting months has its own issues. >> Then again, someone missing their WoW game may be a issue of its own. >> They may get . . . angry. LOL > I think the main problem with long gaps between updates isn't that stuff > breaks in new weird, wonderful ways never seen before (although that can > happen) > > The main problem is that you hit the same problems everyone else had and > solved months before and now can't remember what the solution was! Or > those who could help have forgotten about it, moved on and pay little > attention > > If you update weekly or bi-weekly on ~arch or monthly on arch you > probably hit issues at the tail end when problems are fresh in people;'s > minds and you can get first-rate help right here > That is a good point. At times when I see a upgrade issue mentioned here on the list, I wait a bit about my updates. Once things settle, bugs get worked out etc etc, then I upgrade mine with notes on how to fix a issue should it arise. Sometimes I wish folks could have a option for a third tier of the tree. One that is a month or so further behind for those that really need stable at all costs and minimal upgrade issues. Of course, that's not the Gentoo way tho. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
