I’m also not familiar. But my understanding is that the package maintainers should prevent this situation. Because otherwise even if there are package version dependencies (I don’t actually know if pacman does this) it would just block the update which results in a partial update which isn’t supported. For example if your theoretical unmaintained Firefox blocks the update of libssl but Python requires new functionality you would be stuck in dependency hell. Leaving this problem to the users just makes this problem worse. So the package maintainers need to sort something out.

It is a huge pain when it happens but tends to be pretty rare in practice. Typically they can just wait for software to update or ship a small patch to fix it. But in the worst case you need to maintain two versions of the common dependency. In lots of distros very common dependencies tend to get different packages for different major version for this reason. For example libfoo1 and libfoo2. Then there can be a period where both are supported while packages slowly move from one to the other.

IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.

That’s all you need to know. As long as you always use pacman -Syu you will be fine. pacman -Sy is the real problem. The wiki page is pretty clear about the sequences of commands that are problematic https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported.

Right? What i don’t understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version.

This isn’t correct. It won’t look up the new version. Assuming that the system was in a consistent state it will download the exact same package that you deleted. The system only ever “updates” when you run pacman -Sy. Until you use -y all packages are effectively pinned at a specific version. If the version that gets installed is different than the one you removed it probably means that you were breaking the partial update rule previously.

But that is my point. Just running pacman -S firefox is fine as long as you didn’t run pacman -Sy at some point earlier. It won’t update anything, even dependencies. It will just install the version that matches your current package list and system including the right version of any dependencies if they aren’t already installed.

But that means if you already have Firefox installed it will do nothing.

I think you are a little confused at the problem here. The issue is that partial updates are not supported. The reason for this is very simple, Arch ensures that any given package list works on its own, but not that packages from different versions of the package list work together. So if Firefox depends on libssl the new Firefox package may depend on a new libssl function. If you install that version of Firefox without updating libssl it will cause problems.

There is no way around this limitation. If you install that new Firefox without he new libssl you will have problems. No matter how you try to rules lawyer it. Now 99% of the time this works. Typically packages don’t depend on new library functions right away. But sometimes they do, and that is why as a rule this is unsupported. You are welcome to try it, but if it breaks don’t complain to the devs, they never promised it would work. But this isn’t some policy where you can find a loophole. It is a technical limitation. If you manage to find a loophole people aren’t going to say “oh, that should work, let’s fix it” it will break and you will be on your own to fix it.

Focusing on your commands. The thing is that pacman -S firefox is always fine on its own. If Firefox is already installed it will do nothing, if it isn’t it will install the version from the current package list. Both of those operations are supported. Also pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox is really no different than just pacman -S firefox (other than potentially causing problems if the package can’t be allowed to be removed due to dependencies). So your command isn’t accomplishing anything even if it did somehow magically work around the rules.

What is really the problem is pacman -Sy. This command updates the package list without actually updating any packages. This will enter you system into a precarious state where any new package installed or updated (example our pacman -S firefox command form earlier) will be a version that is mismatched with the rest of your system. This is unsupported and will occasionally cause problems. Generally speaking you shouldn’t run pacman -Sy, any time you are using -Sy you should also be passing -u. This ensures that the package list and your installed packages are updated together.

I hear what you are saying. But our society is pretty fucked up if you “deserve” something bad because you bought a product without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.

The owners should be able to return the product if something like this happens, no matter how long ago they bought it.

I’m struggling to see how this actually made money. Because presumably the customer is paying for the delivery (as well as the food that was never ordered). So the fraudsters would just be paying themselves in a complicated way. My best guess is one of the following:

1. DoorDash is subsidizing orders so much that this is profitable overall (the amount they pay the driver is more than the customer pays) seems unlikely.
2. DoorDash is paying the driver multiple times but only charging the customer once. But if this was the case how was this obvious accounting issue never noticed? Shouldn’t the books come out even in the end?

They want to make money off of services, every service they offer requires a Microsoft account to purchase and use. Everyone that they force to make an account during setup is one step closer to paying for a Microsoft service.

There are obviously tradeoffs (less sales of these versions of windows and some users pushed away from Windows altogether among others), but the motivation is clear.

Just looking at the numbers, they are spending $5G and losing $1G. Their subscriptions are growing. So if they grow another 25% they are making money. (Ignoring infrastructure costs which are most likely a tiny fraction of per-user revenue.) They also just launched an Android app. So I think their story is looking pretty good. Not even considering that it raises the value of Apple TV hardware, their other devices and gives them more lock-in for customers in general that seems like a great investment they made.

To be fair in this case I don’t think we have much right to make fun of them until tolls get placed on the DVP.

The government is too big, why are we paying for healthcare, school, welfare and whatever else? It is unfair to those who don’t use those services.

…oh, except roads and the military, everyone must pay for those.

It’s amazing how many of these policies are posed as a simple fair rule (people should pay for what they want, not have the government decide where spending goes) but in actuality is just a convenient excuse for dismantling institutions that they personally don’t like.

I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

Why fail when you can just do the wrong thing “successfully”?

It is mostly about giving users tools to do moderation. So managers of communities can effectively apply policies and make it easy for people to share moderation decisions so that the work can be shared among communities that trust each other’s moderation decisions.

I’m very exited for this. Just boosting a post always seems so impersonal and out of context. I almost always want to add my own message to my followers. I regularly decide not to boost because of this. I would do it a lot more if I can add my own message/context.

It would be nice if there was a shortcut to go “back to previous site”. Because on one hand using back to navigate around map moves is often very convenient, but sometimes I want to go to the site before the map. Having a two-level history with page and site would be super useful.

#1 items should be backups. (Well maybe #2 so that you have something to back up, but don’t delete the source data until the backups are running.)

You need offsite backups, and ideally multiple locations.

Closed-source software that sends home tons of information about your system without consent. All communication accessible to a VC funded company that has huge pressure to make as much money as possible.

I’ve been doing this from Firefox forever…

But “with audio” is actually a new feature. Previously I was manually sending the audio through my voice channel which worked pretty well but it would be nice to have a separate stream for the streaming audio.

Probably not enough for me to install the spyware though, I’ll keep using Discord via Firefox.

Yeah, I don’t think there are many benefits when keeping the key on the same drive. Other than a bit of obfuscation. It does still help with erasing, as you can wipe the keyslots (rendering the key useless) but with modern storage media deletion is fairly hard to ensure. But still better than unencrypted.

IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).