| Sorry I should have clarified the point up front: The initial configuration is tiresome and complicated. While knowing the details is important, using them as a barrier to entry i.e. by removing the arch installer is just a hideous waste of time. Occasionally, I've had a broken system, packages or dependency failure which has left me in the royal shit with a recovery disk and a text editor. pacman has no transactional semantics around it so you can't stage a package or roll it back easily and no-destructively as you can in deb and RPM based distributions. It relies on the default configuration of all pieces of software i.e. minimal changes to upstream. This is good and all, but most of the upstreams have retarded and dangerous by default configurations. You have to vet every damn package upgrade. As for rolling upgrades, introducing major new package versions mid-cycle is a major risk, particularly when it comes to large critical packages such as DB engines and web servers. Minor version changes can literally shred you. MySQL are very good at that for example (I no longer use their product due to the awful bugs in early 5.0.x release). I see people above are moaning about Ubuntu in comparison. In fact that is just as bad, but for a different reason: it's just hideously mismanaged. They ignore the collective knowledge and mini frameworks that are included in other distributions (for example the /etc/apache2 structure in Debian derivatives). These are incredibly powerful at managing configuration through upgrades etc so hours with diff aren't required. To be honest, I have a virtual machine floating around which was once a physical machine. It was deployed on a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 (nice dual Pentium Pro 200 with 128Mb of RAM, 4 Matrox heads and 18Gb of SCSI disks) with Debian 2.0. This installation is now at Debian 6.0. This has been accomplished EASILY with ONLY dist-upgrades since day one and has survived about 5 bits of hardware. That's how it should be. Rolling releases are dangerous. Planned staged releases. And no I don't particularly care that my Ruby VM is X years out of date. |