| martinleger | hello I'd trying to find out the information about how often does one need to update the system to avoid breakages on devuan ? | 09:11 |
|---|---|---|
| gnarface | if you're running stable it shouldn't break | 09:13 |
| martinleger | I'm coming from pclinuxos and it is recommended to update every week or so as it is a rolling release. Since Devuan is based on Debian stable I suppose you don't need to update every week to avoid broken packages. As I'm looking for a stable distrib that I don't need to update every week | 09:13 |
| gnarface | if you're using testing or unstable, there's afaik no official recommendation | 09:13 |
| gnarface | (testing or unstable may break either way) | 09:14 |
| martinleger | because I might not have internet connection where I'm going for like a month or two so I don't want to update my system then it's broken | 09:14 |
| gnarface | my word is in no way official on this, but current stable is pretty old so i think you should be fine | 09:15 |
| gnarface | obviously backups are always a good idea either way... | 09:15 |
| martinleger | ok so let's say hypotheticaly I can't update my system for a whole year straight, will I need to do a fresh reinstall since I did not update for one year ? | 09:16 |
| gnarface | like i said, with current stable i highly doubt it because it's so old already, there really shouldn't be many updates | 09:17 |
| gnarface | but really you should always have a backup because that's just good practice | 09:17 |
| gnarface | after current stable gets replaced by current testing, things might be riskier for the first couple years but even then, this isn't like a rolling release, and it's not even like it is with testing or unstable... those type of breakages are fairly rare | 09:18 |
| martinleger | what's the point of having a backup if it's an old backup ? I don't understand | 09:18 |
| buZz | just take a mirror of entire repo with you :P | 09:18 |
| buZz | so you can install more programs without internet access | 09:19 |
| buZz | we often did so to LAN parties back in the day :D | 09:19 |
| martinleger | yea sorry i'm kinda noob when it comes to linux | 09:19 |
| martinleger | i just need something that just works without systemd haha | 09:19 |
| gnarface | martinleger: well, hypothetically if an update did hose your system, you'd have something to roll back to that still works. (in that hypothetical situation it's assumed there is still probably a way to get the update to work, just might need some hand-holding) | 09:19 |
| buZz | martinleger: i'd say you'll have an easier time on devuan/debian vs some arch fork :) | 09:20 |
| buZz | oh, RHEL fork , w/e | 09:20 |
| buZz | MANDRAKE fork , geez | 09:20 |
| martinleger | ok i see yea in that case but then I'll have to fix what's broken and I don't think I have time nor knowledge to do that actually | 09:20 |
| gnarface | well in that case you'd... come back here and ask for help | 09:20 |
| buZz | we're on 24/7 | 09:21 |
| gnarface | Thal'kiel says: Always have an escape planned. A lesson I learned the hard way! | 09:21 |
| martinleger | yea but i don't want to bother your guys with my noob questions | 09:21 |
| buZz | its what we're here for | 09:21 |
| gnarface | yep | 09:21 |
| buZz | the only noob question is one unasked | 09:21 |
| gnarface | we're not Debian, we don't have a culture of ladder-pulling around here | 09:22 |
| buZz | hehe | 09:22 |
| buZz | we took all the nice people with us | 09:22 |
| martinleger | i see so you generally update every day or how often do you update ? just out of curiosity | 09:23 |
| gnarface | eh, depends on what i'm doing with it really | 09:23 |
| gnarface | usually isolated boxes with no internet connection on oldstable that have had a year+ of post-release security updates, i don't bother updating them at all anymore | 09:24 |
| martinleger | what's the longest you haven't updated ? | 09:24 |
| gnarface | hard to say, i don't really track it | 09:24 |
| martinleger | but i mean like 1 week or month ? | 09:24 |
| gnarface | if you're not connecting it to the internet, and nothing is actually broken that you're using... you don't really need any updates | 09:24 |
| martinleger | just guestimate | 09:24 |
| martinleger | but I will connect it to internet | 09:25 |
| martinleger | just not very often | 09:25 |
| gnarface | shit man i've got servers up that haven't even been rebooted in years | 09:25 |
| martinleger | like 1 time a month | 09:25 |
| martinleger | oh ok | 09:25 |
| gnarface | once a month to check for security updates sounds fine | 09:25 |
| martinleger | alrightt then im fine | 09:25 |
| martinleger | because i dont want to bother to update my laptop every week so I'm leaning towards devuan stable | 09:26 |
| martinleger | it's less stress for me | 09:26 |
| gnarface | somewhere at debian there's a list of package changes you can poll to see if anything is even necessary | 09:26 |
| martinleger | i like pclinuxos don't get me wrong but I use it for my desktop only | 09:26 |
| martinleger | alright thanks man I appreciate your time spending for my questions | 09:27 |
| gnarface | the issue if you're using unstable or testing and let it get too old and it might not update is definitely real, but usually if you know enough you can figure out how to force the upgrade through anyway | 09:28 |
| gnarface | but with testing or unstable, updating too often can also be risky | 09:28 |
| gnarface | because they break their updates more often | 09:28 |
| gnarface | you will get a feel for it | 09:28 |
| martinleger | but with stable i'm good right ? | 09:28 |
| gnarface | for stable it shouldn't really matter but yea 1 month sounds fine to me | 09:28 |
| martinleger | alright man that's all i really care right now | 09:29 |
| martinleger | im gonna tinker with install and see if devuan is compatible with my thinkpad | 09:29 |
| gnarface | is it a brand new model? | 09:29 |
| martinleger | no | 09:29 |
| martinleger | it's 2015 | 09:29 |
| gnarface | should be fine then | 09:29 |
| gnarface | i'm gonna step away to play some video games but i'll check the scrollback in case you have questions later | 09:30 |
| martinleger | alright man thank you very much - have fun playing :) | 09:30 |
| gnarface | in general this can be a pretty slow channel but usually people do read the scrollback, so if you do stay connected someone will answer your question eventually | 09:30 |
| martinleger | gotcha | 09:30 |
| brocashelm | apt install xlennart | 09:31 |
| mcr | is deb.devuan.org still the preferred place to pull packages? I feel like it keeps changing. I get a lot of 500 errors from it. (via apt-cacher-ng) | 23:22 |
| golinux | Yes. It is a roundrobin of mirrors so you will get whichever one is next in the cycle. | 23:26 |
| mcr | the roundrobin explains why it seems to work if I try enough times :-( | 23:27 |
| rwp | I am coming to the opinion that Devuan's current round-robin mirror, coupled with the way mirrors are updated, has frequent user visible problems and should be improved. | 23:28 |
| rwp | We all have hit cases where glitches and gremlins have caused problems. Always with one mirror or another. Which can be avoided by selecting a specific different working mirror. | 23:29 |
| hagbard | You can see there, which mirrors are behaving, and which not: https://sledjhamr.org/apt-panopticon/results/Report-web.html | 23:31 |
| rwp | There is some movement toward "CC" country code local mirrors but in the US we don't have US local infrastructure so it devolves back to the same round robin as deb.devuan.org does. | 23:31 |
| rwp | Plus since Devuan is an overlay it depends upon the Debian infrastructure to also be fully functional. In the last month a Debian mirror glitch caused transient problems in Devuan too. | 23:34 |
| onefang | We are working on these things. | 23:34 |
| onefang | Well I'm the primary person working on Devuan mirrors. And I'm on holiday for the rest of this month. | 23:35 |
| rwp | We can all tell that this is a labor of love you onefang and if it were not for your kind attention things would not be working at all. | 23:36 |
| rwp | s/labor of love you/labor of love for you/ and we certainly appreciate the work you have put into it. | 23:36 |
| onefang | So after I fix some things in February, you can all send me chocolates on the 14th. B-) | 23:37 |
| mcr | How much space do I need for a mirror these days? I had a debian mirror a few years back, but it outgrew what we could afford, disk-wise at the time. | 23:38 |
| onefang | https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan_mirror_walkthrough.txt might answer some of your questions if you want to start up a package mirror. | 23:39 |
| rwp | I always look forward to Valentine's Day. That's when chocolate goes on sale for more than half price! | 23:39 |
| rwp | onefang, Is having a Devuan mirror (60GB) without a convergent Debian mirror (2TB) useful? | 23:41 |
| mcr | 60G is not a problem :-) | 23:41 |
| mcr | I will follow the process and set stuff up. We are in Canada... Ottawa/Gatineau. | 23:42 |
| onefang | That's what most of our package mirrors do. And why that walkthrough includes instructions on to to redirect to Debian. | 23:42 |
| onefang | Cool, thanks. | 23:42 |
| onefang | Someone else is setting up another USA mirror, and we already have one in Canada and one in USA. | 23:43 |
| rwp | I had not really internalized the difference. That's an interesting difference! | 23:43 |
| mcr | I just hacked my /etc/hosts to point dev -> mishka.snork.ca on my apt-cacher :-( | 23:44 |
| rwp | Regarding apt-cacher-ng one failure mode I am almost for certain is that it caches the HTTP HEAD information which includes a TTL. | 23:45 |
| rwp | And every mirror server effectively has a different web server and serves a different HEAD and a different expire time. | 23:45 |
| rwp | But if the mirror is updated before the HEAD stated expire time then the local apt-cacher-ng cache becomes out of sync with changed-behind-the-scenes mirror update. | 23:45 |
| onefang | I've never used apt-cacher-ng, so no idea. Might be a configuration option? The mirrors use rsync to sync. | 23:46 |
| rwp | I never saw these types of apt-cacher-ng failures with Debian mirrors that I relatively routinely see with Devuan mirrors. | 23:47 |
| rwp | And I think that is because Devuan mirrors are updated in place with rsync but Debian mirrors are updated using the custom script ftpsync(sp?). | 23:47 |
| onefang | Rysnc isn't updating any files that didn't change. | 23:48 |
| rwp | Packages changes often. | 23:48 |
| onefang | And any apt caher really should be using the times from the metadata files to figure out what needs updating. | 23:48 |
| rwp | I don't doubt that apt-cacher-ng has problems. It's the worst proxy I have ever used. Except I used all of the others first and they were worse. | 23:49 |
| onefang | Maybe try using rsync? Some of the mirrors, including mine, support rsync. | 23:49 |
| rwp | Honestly now when I hit problems I just immediately "apt-get purge -y apt-cache-ng && apt-get install -y apt-cacher-ng" to fix things quickly. | 23:50 |
| rwp | apt-cacher-ng isn't a full mirror. It's a most recently used cache. I keep an apt-cacher-ng 10GB package cache sized cache. | 23:50 |
| rwp | When it is not having one of the described problems it works really well to make repeated installs across a farm of systems fast. | 23:51 |
| onefang | I'll add looking at this ftpsync or whatever it's called to my TODO, though if you could investigate more would be useful. | 23:53 |
| rwp | There is never a dull moment when working with operating systems. | 23:54 |
| onefang | One thing you could try is pointing your cache at my mirror sledjhamr.org, then tell me if mine is doing that TTL thing. Then I can at least track down what in Apache is doing that. | 23:59 |
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