Which distro

[Askarus]

I use Arch on my desktop PC and I like it, but I don't really want it on a portable PC.  If you don't stay up to date with the bleeding edge, you will undoubtedly have many problems with Arch.  Stuff breaks all of the time and a lot of the maintenance is left to the user (and this seems to be getting worse over the years).  I also dislike the fact that its package management system doesn't support partial updates (you want to reliably update something?  Have to update everything.  No clue if Debian is the same)

Usually you update everything at once in Debian. I don't doubt there is a way to update only a package and it's dependencies (and the dependencies' dependencies, etc.), but that means it will probably update most of the system anyway in quite a lot of cases. Don't know how you could do that in any other way unless you started having multiple versions of the same dependency and I don't know why one would want this.

I did try out PanDebian for a while.

As soon as there was a LibreOffice update synaptic told me and I could update.

Synaptic can look for packages that got an update.

Then you can select all updates.

If you use the unstable packages then you should get quite some updates I suppose.

(Arch user myself)

 

[Granitehead]

I use Arch on my desktop PC and I like it, but I don't really want it on a portable PC.  If you don't stay up to date with the bleeding edge, you will undoubtedly have many problems with Arch.  Stuff breaks all of the time and a lot of the maintenance is left to the user (and this seems to be getting worse over the years).  I also dislike the fact that its package management system doesn't support partial updates (you want to reliably update something?  Have to update everything.  No clue if Debian is the same)

Usually you update everything at once in Debian. I don't doubt there is a way to update only a package and it's dependencies (and the dependencies' dependencies, etc.), but that means it will probably update most of the system anyway in quite a lot of cases. Don't know how you could do that in any other way unless you started having multiple versions of the same dependency and I don't know why one would want this.

Synaptic can look for packages that got an update.Then you can select all updates.

Of course. -.-I knew it should be possible, but I didn't think of Synaptic (or just that default update manager of Ubuntu) although I must have used it /lots/ of times before switching to just doing "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade".

Never tried selecting just a few packages, but I still guess it must auto-select dependencies of the selected packages too.

 

[WizardStan]

Arch supports partial updates. You can update individual packages or add packages to a blacklist and update everything else. I had to do this when I rolled back Perl.

 

[Askarus]

Arch supports partial updates. You can update individual packages or add packages to a blacklist and update everything else. I had to do this when I rolled back Perl.

I think it's also possible with synaptic.

You can select any program you like that should update.

Simply unselect the one you don't want.

Don't know if there is also the blacklist feature.

 

[Granitehead]

Now that we're talking about it, I think some memory of mine arises which says that there is a feature in Debian to keep a package from updating... it's called "hold"ing a package. Terrible, that unreliable piece of bloody meat.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I want Gentoo, but I'm probably in the minority.

Or, what about keeping with Angstrom, it seems decent.

 

[WizardStan]

Or, what about keeping with Angstrom, it seems decent

It's not. The Pandora didn't have to worry about the heartbleed bug because its version of OpenSSL is so old it didn't have the feature that had the bug in it.

It's basically held together by a special glue derived from Notaz's sweat and tears at this point. The Angstrom website has been down "temporarily" for months now.

 

[N3Cr0]

Ångström is some kind of pain in the ass, at least on the Pandora. It lacks a fully automated package management (At least I never found one), which means you have to download your software manually before you can install it.

So I think we need something with a user friendly and fast package manager. ...And of course, there must be stable sources, which may be the hardest part.

 

[Ziz]

It lacks a fully automated package management (At least I never found one), which means you have to download your software manually before you can install it.

opkg install foobar?Works fine for me. Only problem: There are not so many packages in the repository, however for some small, missing things, it works good.

 

[N3Cr0]

opkg install foobar?Works fine for me. Only problem: There are not so many packages in the repository, however for some small, missing things, it works good.

OK, maybe It never worked for me because I demanded the wrong packages.

 

[_wb_]

opkg install foobar
?
Works fine for me. Only problem: There are not so many packages in the repository, however for some small, missing things, it works good.

OK, maybe It never worked for me because I demanded the wrong packages.

The only thing that annoys me about opkg is that it is very slow (at least on the Pandora), especially when it fails to find something. I end up doing "opkg list | grep foobar" instead of using opkg search.

 

[kaprikawn]

It lacks a fully automated package management (At least I never found one), which means you have to download your software manually before you can install it.

opkg install foobar
?
Works fine for me. Only problem: There are not so many packages in the repository, however for some small, missing things, it works good.

Yeah, but there was issues with some fundamental dependency (ncurses iirc) which meant that you couldn't download a whole host of stuff.  It was pretty much useless.