[mythtv-users] Backend OS - opinions on Archlinux

[Kenni Lund]

2013/1/7 Jameson <imntreal at gmail.com>:
>> The issue with rolling release distributions on servers are that every
>> application on the server suddenly can receive a major update which
>> requires your attention. So when you perform a regular system update,
>> which you expect to spend 5 minutes on, you'll end up spending 3
>> hours, since you need to update some configuration file to be
>> compatible with the new major release of some application which was
>> updated. You can choose to avoid updating some of your applications,
>> but it will only be a matter of time until other packages on the
>> system becomes incompatible with your hold-back packages, and hence
>> forcing you to update the packages anyway.
>
> If updating config files for package updates is chewing up that much
> of your time, you should check out pacdiff.  It along with
> systemd-delta has saved me plenty of time when running updates in
> Arch.

(sorry about my last reply - I hit the send button on my phone by
accident, I'll try again):

That sentence contained some more examples, but I decided to strip it
down before posting the message. Some other real-life examples, which
definitely takes longer than doing a diff between two text files and
reading the manual:
- Updates to the Arch Linux software RAID hook-system breaks assembly
of software RAID and hence - in my case - the ability to boot. When
the server is a headless server in a cupboard, that will be a PITA.
- Same thing applied when the userspace qemu-kvm fork was suddently
replaced with the upstream qemu executable, just because some initial
KVM support had been added to QEMU. The result of that update was that
some of my VMs became unstable and most simply failed to boot due to
invalid/unsupported arguments given to the QEMU executable. It doesn't
take long to downgrade to some older package, but it takes time when
you need to debug the issue first and figure out what's going on.

In the 6 years I ran Arch Linux on my server, I experienced that the
system broke three or four times due to updates - meaning that the
system became unbootable and that I would have to pull the system out
of the cupboard and hook it up to a screen and a keyboard to fix it in
combination with a boot CD. Often you could find a solution to the
problem in the forums or even at the frontpage of archlinux.org - but
that doesn't change the fact that you still need to spend time fixing
the issue when your system breaks. And that never happens when you
actually have the time to fix it.

Best regards
Kenni