[yjftsjthsd-h]

> If you nevertheless haven't updated libarchive since 2018, all hope is not lost! Binary builds of pacman-static are available from Eli Schwartz' personal repository, signed with their Trusted User keys, with which you can perform the update.

I am a little shocked that they bothered; Arch is rolling release and explicitly does not support partial upgrades (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance#Part...). So to hit this means that you didn't update a rather important library for over a year, which officially implies that you didn't update at all for over a year, which... is unlikely to be sensible.

[jpgvm]

Arch is actually surprisingly stable and even with infrequent updates on the order of months still upgrades cleanly most of the time. The caveats to this were the great period of instability when switching to systemd, changing the /usr/lib layout, etc but those changes are now pretty far in the past.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Sure, and I've done partial upgrades and it was mostly fine:) It just surprised me to see the devs going out of their way to support it on volunteer time. On the other hand, maybe that's exactly the reason; maybe someone said "hey look, I can make static packages that are immune to library changes! I guess I'll publish these in case they're useful". Open source is fun like that:)

[semi-extrinsic]

Also, Arch devs probably run Arch servers, and I'd not be surprised if some of those have uptimes in hundreds of days.

[Foxboron]

All Arch infra runs on Arch Linux. The infrastructure repository is all open.

https://git.archlinux.org/infrastructure.git/

Now, official infra doesn't reach hundreds of days. But personal systems might :)

[netfl0]

I remember that time. I had successfully migrate 2 systems to systemd from init. One was a production server. I felt like a genius at the time. Of course all the arch devs did all the real work :)

(I wanted the challenge of running arch in production just to learn, good times)

[ubercow13]

That's only not sensible if you continued to use that computer for the year. You might have just not used it for a year, which doesn't seem unlikely. In fact I just updated my Arch desktop, which I had indeed not used for more than a year :)

[jonathonf]

You're shocked that they consider and plan for a worst-case/edge-case scenario?

That sort of attention to detail is what continues to impress me about the Arch methodology.

[computerfriend]

I have a laptop in another country that I see quite infrequently and I'm pretty happy this exists.

[cjbillington]

pacman-static existed already, and can be used to fix some of the most broken systems in a variety of circumstances. So, they didn't make it just for this, might as well mention it as the right tool to fix the problem should it occur.

[xiaq]

I guess that's why it is provided by an individual, instead of as an officially supported solution.