User talk:Silverhammermba/Recommended package management practices

Update frequency

Latest comment: 17 October 20155 comments3 people in discussion

A note on User:Silverhammermba/Recommended package management practices#Regularly perform system upgrades:

Perform a full system upgrade regularly, at least weekly, both to enjoy the latest bugfix and security updates, and also to minimize the amount of manual intervention required for each upgrade.

I'm not sure we should explicitely mention weekly - at least to me, it sounds like an arbitrary interval. The Arch Linux Archive uses daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, so perhaps we could go in that direction (or simply say "regularly"). Using those snapshots may also be suited as a Tip, to prevent failed retrieving file between upgrade intervals. What do you think?

If you use AUR packages, remember to monitor them for updates and to rebuild them on the same schedule (this is where AUR helpers can be useful). Forgetting to upgrade AUR packages is a kind of partial upgrade, and can have the same problems as previously mentioned.

Well, people do often forget to upgrade their AUR packages, so some mention of this is useful. That said, I'm not too fond on linking to AUR helpers on a general page, also considering AUR maintainers tend to forget to increment pkgrel on soname bumps.

I've also linked your draft in Talk:Pacman#New_approach_2, hope that's ok. :) -- Alad (talk) 16:53, 16 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I copied the weekly bit from another page, I agree it's too explicit. Is there some reasonable upper bound, though? How long is too long to wait for a system upgrade?

Regarding the AUR, I don't think we should necessarily recommend AUR helpers, but I think that there is a large class of users who should know about them. I try to be pretty picky about which packages I install from AUR, and I have 19. I would never recommend that a user in my position manually check each one for updates every time they do a system upgrade. So in that sense I think that a recommended practices list should at least mention AUR helpers. Silverhammermba (talk) 01:57, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

To be pedantic, any action involving the AUR is unsupported since the entire AUR is unsupported. To be practical, I would not explicitly mention that holding upgrades of AUR packages as an unsupported practice (partial upgrades). There is no reason to hold upgrades of official packages, but this is not true for AUR -- consider VCS packages (you may not always want the latest commit), compile time (some packages take longer to build than others) or simply broken packages. The statement on AUR must not be overly specific, but I have nothing against mentioning AUR helpers. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 18:09, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Update: I've removed the mention of explicit time period from System_maintenance#Regularly_upgrade_the_system for the moment. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 18:17, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I have no idea when the failed retrieving file occurs. Is it when the package is no longer available on the mirror? In that case running pacman -Syu (repeatedly) should help, the downloaded packages will remain in local cache. It is theoretically possible that with sufficiently long period since last upgrade and/or with sufficiently slow internet connection the downloaded packages would become obsolete before they are all downloaded, but I doubt that even Arch has this high upgrade rate :-D Lahwaacz (talk) 18:14, 17 October 2015 (UTC)Reply[reply]