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Comment by docgnome | Hacker News Reader

I stopped running Arch when known broken upstream X packages were released into the mainline and the response from the devs was "RTFM, noobs"

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care to shed more light on the subject?

That's really all there was to it. It was about... 2 years ago? I forget what exactly was broken about the packages. But the bug was from upstream and was known to the Arch Devs at the time they OKd the package built upon broken sources to roll out. It got pulled in by just updating the system. I asked what was going on and got directed to a message about it that I didn't fully understand and when I asked, I was told what I said above. As were many other users confused about the sudden breakage of X.

That wasn't really the first time I'd encountered ultra rude devs. I shortly after switched to Gentoo which I found to give the deep control that Arch did but amazingly was a system that worked properly and the community wasn't full of jerks. Hopefully the Arch community has changed, but I don't really intend to try and find out.

I do run Debian now though.

If I remember the same incident that you're talking about, it was a single file that had to be manually removed, and the fix was displayed right on the home page of http://archlinux.org for months..

The final solution could often need only minimal effort to carry out, but to debug and find out the problem, it takes much more time.

And the fix should come in through the right channel, like the package README or ChangeLog. Not sure if the home page of the whole distribution is the appropriate place for a fix like this.

The message should show up on screen when installing the package. If many packages are upgraded at once, a user could miss it. The output is also sent to /var/log/pacman.log

All that said I'd recommend to anyone new to subscribe to the 'Latest News' RSS feed: http://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/

You asked a question they couldn't answer, and they didn't want to say "I don't know."

That said Arch does have lots of documentation the answer is probably somewhere in the massive Arch docs.

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