I use Arch linux for a number of reasons. Mainly, it’s transparent and doesn’t hold your hand. You’re given simple, powerful tools and along with that comes the ability to shoot yourself in the foot. This extends to the community where we can and should help those newer than ourselves to manage this responsibility intelligently, but without holding their hand or taking any of that power away through obfuscation.
The Problem 🔗
There’s always been the potential for a particular command to break your system:
$ pacman -Sy foo
What this command literally means is, “update the local index of
available packages and install the package foo”. Misguided users
assume this is the correct way to ensure you receive the latest version
of foo available. While it’s true that it is one way, it’s not the
correct way. Moreover, using this command can easily break your
system.
Let’s walk through an example to illustrate the problem:
- A user has firefox 3.0 and gimp 6.1 installed, both of which depend on libpng>=1.0
- An update comes out for libpng to version 1.2
- Arch maintainers release libpng 1.2, firefox 3.0-2, and gimp 6.1-2 (the latter two now depending on libpng>=1.2)
- An update comes out for firefox to version 3.1
- Arch maintainers release firefox 3.1 which depends on libpng>=1.2
- Our user (incorrectly) says
pacman -Sy firefoxhoping to get this new version - pacman (correctly) installs firefox 3.1 and libpng 1.2
There’s nothing here to tell pacman to update gimp since libpng 1.2 is
= 1.0 which meets gimp’s dependency contstraints.
However, our user’s gimp binary is actually linked directly to /usr/lib/libpng.so.1.0 and is now broken. Sadface.
In this example, the outcome is a broken gimp. However, if the shared dependency were instead something like readline and the broken package something like bash, you might be left with an unusable system requiring a rescue disk or reinstall. This of course lead to a lot of unhappy users.
The Solution 🔗
There are a few options to avoid this, the two most viable being:
- Instruct users to not execute
-Sy foounless they know howfooand its dependencies will affect their system. - Instruct Arch maintainers to use a hard constraint in these cases, so firefox and gimp should depend on libpng==1.0
If we went with option two, the user, upon running pacman -Sy firefox
would’ve gotten an error for unresolvable dependencies stating that gimp
requires libpng==1.0.
Going this route might seem attractive (especially to users) but it
causes a number of repository management headaches dealing with exact
version constraints on so many heavily depended-upon packages. The
potential headache to the maintainers far out-weighed the level of
effort required to educate users on the pitfalls of -Sy.
So, option one it is.
The Wrong Advice 🔗
It was decided (using the term loosely) to tell anyone and everyone to
always, no matter what, when they want to install foo, execute:
$ pacman -Syu foo
I argue that this advice is so opposite to The Arch Way, that it’s downright evil.
What this command really says is, “update your system and install
foo”. Sure, that’s no big deal, it’s not harmful, may or may not be
quick and ensures you don’t run into the trouble we’ve just described.
Coincidentally, this is also the correct way to ensure you get the
absolute latest version of foo – if and only if foo had a new
version released since your last system update.
My issue is not that it doesn’t work. My issue is not that it’s
incorrect advice to those with that specific intention. My issue is
that, nine times out of ten, that’s not the user’s intention. They
simply want to install foo.
You’re now telling someone to run a command that does more than what
they intended. It does more than is required. It’s often given out as
advice with no explanation and no caveats. “Oh, you want to install
something? -Syu foo is how you do that…” No, it really isn’t.
You’ve now wasted network resources, computational resources, the user’s
time and you’ve taught them that the command to install foo is -Syu foo. Simplicity and transparency aside, that’s just lying.
If you’ve been given this advice, I’m sorry. You’ve been done a disservice.
The Correct Advice 🔗
To update your system:
$ pacman -Syu
To install foo:
$ pacman -S foo
To update your system and install foo:
$ pacman -Syu foo
Simple, transparent, no breakage. That’s the advice you give out.
Sure, by all means, if your true intention is to upgrade the system and
install foo, you should absolutely -Syu foo but then, and only then,
does that command make any sense.
</rant>