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Comment by phzbOx | Hacker News Reader

I love Arch. Best distribution by far in my opinion. Sadly, I had huge problems one week ago when I did a full system upgrade (took me 2 days to fix everything that was corrupted and lost lots of money because of it) but then it was my fault. (Never use --force with a system upgrade!) To be fair, there should be a warning when you try to execute the command as it's probably not what a user would want to do.

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I have a bunch of painful stories about using Arch but the best one happened most recently.

I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package. I was told upgrading a single package is generally a bad idea and its better to just update the entire system. I have had a server running Gentoo for ~5 years and I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.

I invoked the upgrade command and I see it wants to upgrade the linux kernel to 3.2 and a bunch of other stuff. After the upgrade completes I rebooted the machine (or it rebooted itself, I forget). It wasn't able to boot up. I put in a rescue cd but I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

This is exactly why I don't do 'emerge world' in gentoo anymore. It has backfired on me more than 50% of the time (when I used to do it). I simply do not trust these bleeding edge distro people to get everything working all the time and I am annoyed at the zealots who constantly advise to just upgrade as if nothing could possibly go wrong.

Good points here. I currently run Arch but would be interested in seeing sort of a LTS style Arch that would only update packages with security updates and other stable packages. I guess that would require a lot of maintenance though.

> I frequently upgrade single packages at a time so I saw no problem with this but ok, I'm not an Arch expert so I followed the #arch people's advice.

Imagine your window manager relies on libX as a dependency. You update CoolNewApp, which relies on an updated version is libX. So it installs that from your repos and CoolNewApp works great. However, your WM needs an update to be compatible with the newer version of libX, and that update wasn't installed, so the next time you go to login, bam, broken system.

I imagine the GP means "upgrade single package, including dependencies". This is very common, at least on Gentoo.

This is exactly the kind of things that pacman should take care of. Simply "upgrade everything" is not a good practice, it will break for some people, enough to have them annoyed.

Definitely a valid opinion, but the way I see it when you use Arch you inherently don the hat of one of those 'bleeding edge distro people,' and it's up to you to keep everything working. It's simply the price I pay to have the most up-to-date software and some of the best performance I've ever seen.

More hegemonic distro's like Debian trade some of that speed and freshness for a more hands-off experience. Nothing wrong with either!

I think having to use an option like '--force' is considered warning enough. Which is, I think, perfectly reasonable. Of course, I don't know your exact scenario, but that's how things seem to work.

Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force <enter>). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)

This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.

This issue is completely orthogonal to whether or not a GUI was in use. The text UI could just have easily asked for confirmation, and a graphical UI could easily allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot.

Even though I agree with your statement, do you truly believe that if a GUI had presented the options Yes/No/Cancel/Force or whatever, that less people would have suffered from issues like this? I probably would have used that --force flag on a non production system and a GUI would even make that decision more easy for me...

This has nothing to do with a GUI vs. command-line interface. You're confusing the decision of what information to present with how to present it.

Well, the thing is that it complained about only one particular file which I didn't care and knew it was safe to --force on it. So, basically, you type:

  foo -abc

And it tells you, "Can't alter file bar.conf".

After a google search you read, "bar.conf needs the --force switch to be altered".

So you're like, fine..

  foo -abc --force

* Everything crash *

Next reboot,

"Press <enter> to get in the shell"

Me pressing enter.. and even the keyboard isn't working.

That's what happened.

You should be using Pacmatic. The --force thing was a news feed item, and Pacmatic would have shown you the official news before you could have done damage.

I didn't know about this (on and off, but current and likely more consistent in the future arch user). From me, and anyone in my position, thank you.

Thanks, that's interesting!

The more I use Arch, the more I do things on the command line. That means a lot less software to maintain. I think if you run tons of different software, you are asking for things to break.

I happily run dwm, and a handful of CLI tools. This minimalistic setup is enough for me - and seems to cut down on things breaking.

I think using the 'cutting-edge' distros (Gentoo, Arch) in general pushes one to use more CLI tools rather than GUIs. At least that was the case with me.

> This minimalistic setup is enough for me

I think that's a poor choice of words ;). It implicates that a GUI, or 'less minimalistic' setup is something 'more', something better. I think it's just something different, for differenet needs. Being very careful, maybe using less GUIs and handful of CLIs is an evolution (in certain areas). You can do more (stuff) with less (commands). But "great power, comes with great responsibility" = you can easily shoot yourself in a foot, and so it is not for everyone.

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