GNOME Software 3.14 Will Work On Arch Linux With PackageKit

[magika]

@Sonadow
I'm not sure I follow you but you seem to strangely ignore 'security' part of discussion.
Is your system physically disconnected from the world?

[RahulSundaram]

That is, until the mirrors became rather enthusiastic in taking down the repositories for EOL-ed releases. As of now i'd be very lucky if an old Fedora release's repositories will still be up after 2 years.

Running EOL releases isn't really a good strategy for most users due to security issues but fwiw, a master archive for all releases is available at https://archives.fedoraproject.org/p...inux/releases/

Due to the shared library model in Linux, people who want a stable base with the ability to cherry pick a lot of the latest apps don't have any good solutions at this point since latest apps typically want the latest libraries as well. RHEL/CentOS has software collections and Fedora has copr and is introducing a playground repository which are partial solutions to the problem but Lennart's btrfs/systemd proposal might address this in the future.

[hrkristian]

Since we are talking about Arch, can anyone answer some of my questions?

As is the case with most non-rolling release distributions, the repositories are typically locked to specific versions of libraries, system applications, etc for the lifespan of the particular release. And this can be further locked to allow only release-time packages by disabling the updates repository. Which is what I do with any distribution installed in my computers.

In Arch, the repositories are always updated daily, which introduces a huge degree of instability (instability as in the repositories are always in a state of flux). Is it possible to lock the Arch repositories to, say only use packages available in the repository only on X / XX / XXXX? Example being, I install Arch today, and i want to have the repositories locked to this particular day for the next 3 years until I'm ready to unlock them and do a full system upgrade to the latest kernel / xorg / etc etc, then lock the repos again to the day the upgrade was carried out for the next 3 years, and so on.

Or will using a typical release-type distribution be more useful for my needs? Im just too lazy to have to reinstall the operating system every 2 -3 years and recompiling my favorite software all over again.

Sounds like what you need is one or two simple scripts honestly.
Create a script that ignores every package when running pacman -Syyu except those explicitly allowed, like if you want Chromium/Firefox update for security purposes.
Then create an install script where you upon launch get prompted for package name and then whether you want to add it to the Rolling Update list (or whatever amazing name you want it to have.)

You're still probably going to run into dependency fuckery, but that's as close as I can imagine you getting with Arch.

[zanny]

In Arch, the repositories are always updated daily, which introduces a huge degree of instability (instability as in the repositories are always in a state of flux). Is it possible to lock the Arch repositories to, say only use packages available in the repository only on X / XX / XXXX? Example being, I install Arch today, and i want to have the repositories locked to this particular day for the next 3 years until I'm ready to unlock them and do a full system upgrade to the latest kernel / xorg / etc etc, then lock the repos again to the day the upgrade was carried out for the next 3 years, and so on.

Or will using a typical release-type distribution be more useful for my needs? Im just too lazy to have to reinstall the operating system every 2 -3 years and recompiling my favorite software all over again.

Well one, if you are using Arch and are not using a lot of AUR pkgbuilds you are not compiling anything. You can also use pkgbuild.com repos for AUR packages to get some of them in binary form, and a lot of AUR packages pull down binary packages as well, albeit most of them are compile from source.

Two, you can do this by just cloning your /var/cache/pacman/pkg and hosting that as a Archlinux repo mirror. That local mirror never gets updated and you can stay on one set of packages. That is highly inadvisible because you never get security updates that way that will leave your system vulnerable to exploitation especially if you wait three years between updates. And Arch is not designed to be held for years and then upgraded at once, you will likely break the system trying to do that.

If you want pacman without the full rolling aspect, try Manjaro. They update every ~6 months or so. If you want to wait longer than that you should be using Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, or an OpenSUSE LTS.

Oh, and it looks like this is an eight month old thread that got resurrected replying to this post. Whee. Neat that the subscriptions are the new site are carrying over from this far back, though.