[Wilya]

Arch is very good if you run it as your main system and keep it updated very frequently. Forget it for six months (because it's an unused multiboot, or whatever) and try to do an upgrade, and it might be more painful.

I got burnt by the glibc mess last summer, where you had to run a specific set of --force things in a given order to get through and if you didn't, well, you lost your /lib (at which point it's game over, since freaking pacman isn't statically linked).

Response in forums or irc (I don't remember) was "It's rolling release, you had three whole months to update, too bad for you".

Atomic releases avoid the problem because everyone will do this kind of breaking changes at the same point, whereas with rolling releases, you can't force people to update all at the same time, so you'll always end up losing people, once your migration path inevitably becomes invalid because of the way everything goes forward.

[gizmo686]

Couldn't you solve that problem with some type of repository snapshoting/versioning. So if you try to update more than, say, 1 month, the system installs the updates incrementally.

[lucian1900]

That is precisely what the Ubuntu proposal describes.