[arch] arch-stable

[RedShift]

Erwin Van de Velde wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think that Arch will never be the best server distribution:
> e.g. Moving from PHP 4.x to 5.0 without leaving the older version in the 
> packages surely resulted in problems for a couple of web-based tools. Having 
> a new kernel on an almost weekly basis is not going to help either. In my 
> opinion Arch is meant to be easy, fast and near the edge between development 
> and stable versions, which is why I like it on my laptop. 
> For servers however, a little more stability is likely to be appreciated and 
> so on the servers of our research group, I installed FreeBSD, which combines 
> in my opinion stability and new features in a very good way, even though I am 
> not eager to install it on my laptop due to the compilation times of the 
> ports you install (it is almost like a source based distribution if you 
> update regularly).
> 
> Most of the time I am not a huge fan of all the different Linux and BSD 
> distributions which differ in some details (e.g. think of all the 
> Ubuntu-based distributions), but I think that there is a clear gap between a 
> server distribution and one for personal use, a gap that cannot be closed 
> just by keeping some older versions in some type of a stable repository. One 
> of the most difficult things will be that you will get a huge amount of 
> packages or that the user will have to start compiling everything anyway 
> (version differences with libraries etc.: apache x.y compiled against lib*** 
> z.u, apache x.y compiled against lib*** z'.u', ...). It does not seem like 
> fun to be creating binaries for all those combinations and who will decide 
> what is stable enough when?

The library problem you are explaining is exactly what I am trying to 
prevent. Let's say for example apache has been updated to 2.2.5, and in 
the meantime zlib was updated too. So apache has been linked to the new 
zlib. Suppose you only want to update apache. This poses a problem 
because it has been linked with the new zlib while the old one is still 
being used on your system. Updating zlib could lead to other problems, 
php was probably linked with zlib too, etc, etc... That's the problem 
I'm trying to overcome with arch-stable.

> 
> This is of course just my 2 cents :-)
> 
> Greetings,
> Erwin
> 
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