Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6.

The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.

In Arch, there is never a reason to "manually manage a copy outside the package manager". You can and should install everything via PKGBUILDs -- the format isn't very hard, just keep a template around, fill in the metadata, and make tweaks to the commands to run if necessary. Then everything is always kept in pacman and easy to find and/or remove.

You don't even have to do this; there was a PKGBUILD added to AUR, so all you had to do in this (and most) cases is download the PKGBUILD from AUR or use something like yaourt or clyde that does this automatically.

For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6.

And despite Arch's rolling release cycle, I still have much less pain with it than I do with Ubuntu's custom-hybrid-half-versions, based on a release already 4-months-old, with about half of the changes in the newer versions backported, and including handfuls of patches never added upstream. See the Debian SSL fiasco for why this is a bad idea. The system is much feistier than Arch in my experience, even though Arch will occasionally perform upgrades that necessitate lots of rebuilds.

>> "For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6."

Which makes it all the more disappointing that all I could find were needlessly complex solutions instead.

yaourt looks very helpful. Seeing it listed as the 20th "AUR Helper" (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers) didn't exactly make it jump out at me and scream, "this is what you want!"

There are a few things I don't like about Arch, but I definitely agree that a rolling release is preferable to six-month-cycles. I've been using Debian testing for a few months now instead of Ubuntu and it's gone pretty smoothly.

I liked the idea of the rolling release, which is one of the reasons I was trying Arch in the first place. (And I was a Gentoo user before Ubuntu came along).

But it's got to "roll" a little smoother than that. I understand some potholes here and there, but that was a sinkhole.

> The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

That was because you did an upgrade from a mirror in which not all packages where updated. Bad luck.

No. The packages themselves weren't up to date, it wasn't just the mirror failing to fetch the new ones. Hence threads like this one (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808) with suggestions like "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7."

I didn't do an "upgrade". It was a first-time fresh install.

I see. I remember when libjpeg-7 were introduced some people had problems either with async mirrors or they forgot to rebuild packages in AUR. Yours was a particularly unfortunate case, sorry it happened at your first experience with ARCH. I'd suggest you try again sooner or later. It's a nice distro, really.

I have been tempted to try again, and I can accept the idea that I just hit things at the exact wrong time.

At this point, the main roadblock to trying Arch again hasn't been that past experience, but rather a very high level of satisfaction with Ubuntu 10.04.

Curiosity will get me to take a stab at Arch again, but I really like what Ubuntu is doing on the design/integration side of things.

> "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7."

Would a source-distribution like Gentoo get around those problems?

Yes, as long as there were no compile-time errors because of changes from libjpeg6 to libjpeg7.

Do you know why Ubuntu goes for `batch-releases'?

Officially because they should be testing the version before distributing it. The main advantage of batch-releases to my eyes is that every 6 months there is a lot of fuzz and media attention, which is very good to draw new users - so, very welcome.

Thanks. They explain "Ubuntu releases on a time based cycle, rather than a feature driven one."--but they seem to ignore the possibility of continuous updates.