LWN: Comments on "Rolling with Arch Linux"

Racists on the Arch Linux Mailing List

nix — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:21:25 +0000

That local-part is not RFC compliant. RFC2822 saith:

"The maximum total length of a user name or other local-part is 64 characters."

That local-part is 84 characters long. You were lucky they could talk to you at all.

Racists on the Arch Linux Mailing List

Meeku — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:15:07 +0000

I have copied / pasted a response part done originally at another site:

"2. -prod and probe forum members- is not correct phrase either. They were some on that Arch Linux mailing list who just could not accept my email address, hare_krsna_hare_krsna_krsna_krsna_hare_hare_hare_rama_hare_rama_rama_rama_hare_hare -at- ..... and just used racist weasel words and phrases, hounding me on and on relentlessly.

3. -etiquette- was used by me without any foul language. Some on that list were using racist weasel words and because I have been a victim before several times I could tell, it was not new to me."

Racists on the Arch Linux Mailing List

nix — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:07:11 +0000

The place for font postings is font design lists, not public general lists. Fonts are often not small, and dumping megabytes of font data into everyone's mailboxes (if that is indeed what you did) is tantamount to mailbombing.

Racists on the Arch Linux Mailing List

Meeku — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:46:11 +0000

I joined the Arch Linux public general mailing list and posted a free opensource FOSS font for coders to use, Rail Model font. I was accused of spamming and trolling by certain developers there. These were just excuses from them as underneath they had a racist attitude to my email address for the mailing list:
hare_krsna_hare_krsna_krsna_krsna_hare_hare_hare_rama_hare_rama_rama_rama_hare_hare -at- .....

Thus when I tried to defend against their accusations I was banned from there, no discussion nothing.

Rolling with Arch Linux

jospoortvliet — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:57:27 +0000

Those who want an easy install and a functional system out of the box should
avoid it.

Actually, they don't have to avoid it. They can go to http://chakra-
project.org/ and use the convenient livecd with installer there to get Arch
on their system. Includes graphical package management and other goodies ;-)

Arch will never be Ubuntu but with Chakra you can be up and running in 30
minutes.

Rolling with Arch Linux

jospoortvliet — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:53:37 +0000

apt doesn't miss functionality compared to pacman, I'm pretty sure of that.
Pacman IS pretty fast, indeed, but to be honest I don't care that much.

AUR

jospoortvliet — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:49:12 +0000

and if you install the appropriate tools (yaourt, if I recall correctly) it
even builds and installs your stuff automatically - just like gentoo does :D

Rolling with Arch Linux

dlang — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:16:33 +0000

how much of the difference that you are talking about is related to the number of packages in the repository?

also, are you familiar with apt-cache (specifically apt-cache search)? it may have some of the functionality that you seem to think is missing

Rolling with Arch Linux

tnoo — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:24:39 +0000

The package manager (pacman) runs about 5 times faster than the Ubuntu apt-
get (my experience, no precise timing). Substrings can be searched for using
pacman -Ss (repository) or pacman -Qs (local installs). Updating the package
database takes about 5-10 seconds for my laptop on a good network (for the
repositories core, extra and community). All in all reasonably fast.

Rolling with Arch Linux

dlang — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:18:20 +0000

it depends on what you mean by 'an issue'

there are very definitely config options that can be selected that will change the speed of the applications

but most people don't care about this sort of thing.

Rolling with Arch Linux

njs — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:43:50 +0000

> is this an issue with non-source-based distributions? How fast the applications run?

No.

Rolling with Arch Linux

phillemann — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:19:31 +0000

"Arch seems very fast. While there is no exact measure, the overall subjective experience during this test was highly positive. A completely functional system with all necessary system tools and services installed and running, was fast and stable 100% of the time."

I personally would have rather heard how the distribution's _package manager_ performs. How long does it take to resolve the dependencies for a package having lots of them? Is there a quick way to search for a package (maybe not by exact name match but also something fuzzier)? Does it take long to update the package database?

I'm a gentoo user so I suppose my applications run as fast as they possibly can, but is this an issue with non-source-based distributions? How fast the applications run?

AUR

tnoo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:41:24 +0000

In addition to all the advantages mentioned in the article, the Arch User Repository (AUR) is one of the great achievements. There are few software packages that could not be easily built with a user-contributed installation script in the AUR. This gives me package manager control even on my own hacks.