[jon6]

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I had some outdated package that I wanted to update so I asked in the #arch irc room how to just update that one package.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.

[aninteger]

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.

[NeutronBoy]

> 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.

[Spakman]

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

[babarock]

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.

[tammer]

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!