Summary: Which Linux distribution is stable yet up-to-date

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 13:32:20 +0200
Shlomi Fish <shlomif at gmail.com> wrote:


> Sorry for being unclear, but by "unusable state" I meant that one can
> no longer upgrade the system it using "pacman -Syu" (or whatever the
> command is) because it gives errors. The system itself works fine but
> will run outdated software applications (and often ones with known
> security vulnerabilities). 

I've had this happen several times with Manjaro (and therefore I assume
it would happen with Arch also). All the cases of which I'm aware are
solveable like this:

pacman -Syu --ignore badpkgname

The preceding allows the rest of your upgrade to go through. Report the
problem, and in the near future the bad program will be fixed and you
can upgrade the formerly bad package.

It's really unfortunate that, without --ignore, pacman sees fit to go
through the entire the entire upgrade, perhaps a half hour, and then
tell you there's one bad package and upgrade nothing. Fortunately, in
the time I spent with Manjaro, I saw only two or three cases in which a
package refused to install and took the whole pacman -Syu with it.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
November 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques