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On 31/08/13 06:20, Kai Hendry wrote:
On 30 August 2013 09:36, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:I hate almost everything about Arch: pacman sucks, the AUR repository system sucks, the forums suck. The only good thing I have to say aboutpacman is sane compared to Debian's dpkg. AUR is really nice. Something I fealt that was missing from Debian. A sane way to get contributed packaging. PKGBUILD is so much nicer that the myriad of Debian cruft. Forums do suck. I don't use them. I wish there was a mailing list, but it would probably degenerate to debian-user levels of usefulness. If I want help, I use the IRC channel. You must admit https://wiki.archlinux.org/ is the best.it is that it boots preposterously fast. I love the way that they randomly deprecate stuff (ifconfig > ip) and then just casually post in their stupid website "announcements" section - "yeah, hey ho, we've probably just broken all your scripts LOL". I love the way they've only just got their heads around package signing, and it's still notI don't care for package signing http://natalian.org/archives/2012/01/18/Archlinux_Pacman_GPG/mandatory (morons). My non-testing, i.e., allegedly "stable" Arch VM overwrote it's own grub2 configs again today, resulting in me having to boot it from the prompt and fix it manually.Don't use grub2. Use syslinux. Reject bloatware.Any Arch users (Kai is a fan I think) want to defend their distro of choice? Convince me I'm wrong please, because I'd love to put a bullet in it. Don't even get me started on yaourt.Archlinux caters to the clueful. :-) Use `cower` not yaourt. I love Archlinux. Now running it on sg.webconverger.com, a non-critical server. http://webconverger.org/servers/ Ah ha! Finally, Arch-user-like typing detected. I'll do my best to remain civil :] Quite frankly, I see little overall difference between Arch packaging and Debian packaging - there are of course differences, but they're not as serious as one might think, and there are more similarities than disparities. I package for both systems and neither give me any substantial difficulties as compared to generating RPMs for example. I'm not particularly fond of Gentoo's ebuilds either, but that's another matter. But as an end-user tool, pacman does not stack up well against dpkg/apt which is the single most powerful, sophisticated package management system I've ever come across. Pacman does not tolerate simple failures well - for example, as I stated previously, Pacman will just abort an entire transaction if it misses downloading even one package from it's list due to a dodgy mirror or whatever whereas apt will deal with it (get it from another mirror). Pacman's extended options for searching remote packages, local installed packages, cached but not-installed local packages, grepping for executables and being told which package provides it, etc, are not exactly stellar and somewhat cryptic to boot. Pacman sometimes fails, often confuses me and isn't even remotely as mature and robust as Debian's weapon-grade level package management. But, I will admit I've seen worse and credit where it's due, Pacman is blindingly fast: really, really crazy fast. Which is good, because if you Arch you will be updating. A lot. I see we agree about the Arch forums being awful - it's sadly full of Arch users and as we all know, they're universally (with the obvious exception of your good self!) tossers. Relatively speaking, I'm a big bad internet veteran and have weathered my own share of raging flame wars on the Gentoo and OpenBSD forums/lists before, but I have never before encountered the same level of elitist arrogance and smug complacency as on the Arch forums. Quick googling will unearth countless examples of literal "RTFM n00b" and "go back to windows if you can't handle it" responses - classy. I'm surprised there isn't a mailing list though - god knows, Arch *really* needs at least an announcements list so one can at least get a heads up about the upcoming Pacman-based destruction of your system during upgrade that you will inevitably experience. But we seem to agree here, so there isn't much to say - I also agree that Debian forums do suffer a high SNR but that comes with the territory of being so popular I suppose. Unlike you, I despise IRC so I've never tried out their help from that angle (and probably never will). Annoyingly, wiki.archlinux.org *is* pretty good - it used to be that googling for Linux help would usually deposit you on the Ubuntu forums/wiki somewhere but increasingly I find you're just as likely to end up on the Arch sites now instead. The good thing is that Arch users do tend to fiddle with their setups obsessively and even the most obscure combinations of software and options often turn up on the Arch wiki with advice - frequently the sort of stuff that no sane Ubuntu user would even know exists, let alone have actually tried to get it running. I've got a bookmarked Arch wiki page open right now because it's got some great information about VirtualBox guests booting using emulated EFI I've not found elsewhere. So yeah, you've got me on this one. Syslinux has... issues. Past version 6 most seem to be fixed admittedly. Don't get me wrong, it has it's place - I've written out more than a few menu.cfg files myself, but those are for my PXEBOOT network systems (which I can't live without). Syslinux is pretty basic, and perhaps ideal for a typical Arch fiddler who's only interested in shaving a second or two from their boot to desktop speed (the sort of pointless crap I don't care about) - meanwhile, I don't just look after a single personal system which I can obsessively tamper with: I have racks of machines and an army of VMs, automated testing systems, different CPU architectures and more OS flavours than you can shake a stick at. There is a reason why every single distro (including Arch ironically) ships with either grub-legacy or grub2 by default (except Slackware, which believe it or not, even still ships the testing version with LILO!) and that's because it's better at doing it's job properly. Syslinux only quite recently got several options that have been in grub a long, long time: /boot on multiple devices (think: RAID), boot encrypted LVMs, BTRFS, GPT, EFI, etc. Syslinux still won't let me boot from XFS (bad news if you're on RHEL7, which defaults to XFS) or ZFS (Solaris also ships with and boots via Grub2 and I'm not going to get far if I can't even see the ZFS root). Grub will drop me into a special grub shell on command or by default if it has a problem from which I can rearrange partitions, chainload, rewrite the bootloader completely, edit options, etc. When syslinux craps itself and fails, I'll be using grub to rescue it. Don't get me wrong, syslinux has a vital place and it does (mostly) do it's job fine, with limitations. But there's a reason why the entire world has standardised on grub - calling it bloatware is just silly. Ah, "cower" eh? Fair enough, I've never heard of it, but is that surprising? Let's have a little look shall we? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers Holy crap! That's like, what 20, maybe 30 different cobbled together tools all under the ominously highlighted top-of-page banner: "Warning: None of these tools are officially supported by Arch devs." Oh good, I look forward to filing bug reports on that then. There's a nice warning about several of the tools offering non-secure sourcing of pkgbuilds too, leading to "can allow malicious code to be executed". Oh goody. Insecure, buggy, unsupported with malicious code execution support too... Are you kidding me? As much as I hate AUR in the first place, I'll just stick with doing it manually for now, so I can control what's happening. It seems that the best thing about Arch is it offers choices - between different flavours of absolute rubbish. It doesn't matter what kind of bread you use, a shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich. Well, I don't think I've been too unfair or particularly rude (if so, I apologise!) and I've replied to everything except http://natalian.org/archives/2012/01/18/Archlinux_Pacman_GPG/ (yep, I read that too). I know that's your personal blog but after reading that entry several times (I note your respondent there is actually the guy who writes cower isn't he?) I'm going to have to reign myself in until a different time, because I can't for the life of me formulate a response that doesn't seriously cross the line from constructive criticism to scathing abuse, and that's not cool, so I'll just keep a lid on it until I can come up with something polite. Pro-tip: every single OS in the universe signs and checksums their update/install packages these days, and have for a long time (even Arch - only you manually disable it). It's basically you vs every single OS dev/maintainer/packager in existence... who do you really think is going to be right? But you did ask politely for no flaming and informed debate only, so I'll button it now. At least you're asking good questions I guess, if people get that up in arms about it! Regards PS: I am now going to boot an Arch VM and try out cower, wish me luck. Who knows, maybe you'll see me on the Arch IRC later... |
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