Update workflow - maintaining configs

Basic Help & Support
#1

Hello everyone and authors.

I’m using ArchLabs as my main os for three months (and not just because of the looks).

That’s my first experience with rolling release distro so I can’t figure optimal update workflow.

Currently I am running -Syu once in a while and as the system updates some awesome AL specific things begin to collapse: especially trayer, obmenu and polybar modules. After a month or so I found some amazing github repo (ArchLabs-User-Home) with an update script.
This scripts corrects the errors, but it completely ruins my humbly tailored configs and ads some more sometimes. So i need to restore them every time.

What am I doing wrong?

#2

Hi @onoma, we may need some more info to determine your issue.

Can you please add your changes here so we can see what may be the issue?

#3

Hello @Dobbie03, thank you for your amazing work.

Its just a variety of small changes - keybind here, alias there. Across several files (.zshrc, openbox’s rc.xml and so on). They work perfectly before each script run.

I’ve run this script 5-6 times https://github.com/ARCHLabs/Archlabs-User-Home/blob/master/upgrade-archlabs
and every time it just overwrites this configs.

May be I should not run it, but it corrects various strange behavior - like jgmenu not working (this was back in December) or openbox menu generation (last week).

Regards

#4

If you are on a more recent release, 2017.10, 2017.12 and 2018.02 you should just need to upgrade as usual using “pacman -Syu”.

That script was intended for pre-rolling release ArchLabs releases.

#5

Weird. I am on 2017.12. I’ll try to abstain from using it for a couple of months and report my situation.
Thanks

#6

I really dont recommend running the upgrade scrpt again and again
and it does warn you before overwriting existing configs

If you explain the issues that are causing you to need running this then we can get it fixed ez-pz

Apologies for the regressions, I try to keep it to a minimum but sometimes a change for an upcoming release will break backwards compatibility

  • Re: menu switcher breaking, I’ve fixed the compatibility breaking update from a few weeks ago

  • Re: jgmenu breaking, it’s under active development and had a compatibility breaking update with the most recent release, these things are sometimes unavoidable when we use bleeding edge

Things will stabilize soon enough, we are still in the early stages after going full rolling release and making large changes to configs/scripts, given time we’ll have less and less of these breaking changes overall.

That being said, this is Arch based… If you thought you’d get away free without being a system maintainer you are sadly mistaken

If you have issues I urge you to post here, or better yet raise an issue on our github
This way we can work on fixing them sooner rather than later, it’s hard for us as a small team to test every change with different systems

As always with all of the above I would post here asking for assistance with the issue in question
generally you’ll get a helpful response fairly fast

Cheers

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#7

Hello @nate , thank you for your work. ArchLabs is a great distro, and it got me rolling with Linux again after huge disappointment with Ubuntu a couple of years ago.

By no means my original post was an attempt to criticize the way that you maintain the release process. I was just trying to figure out if I am adding some additional work to my system maintenance routines embedded in rolling release distro. I

You and @Dobbie03 got it covered for me. I won’t be running the update script anymore. It turned out by running it I add myself unnecessary headache.

Cheers, and thanks again.

1 Like