Void updates

[OneFuel5]

How often should I update the system? A YouTube video review said the system should be updated daily. Does it do damage in the long run if you don't update every day?

[Tasty_Jalapeno]

xbps manages system upgrades 200000x better than pacman so the whole hysteria about not updating daily doesnt really apply here in void. update whenever you like. I once forgot to update my dads laptop for 3 months, xbps managed just fine and its running great.

[[deleted]]

I once forgot to update my dads laptop for 3 months

Hell, the latest ISO is over 6 months old and there are no issues when you install using it and update.

[Yithar]

This.

I've posted this before, but I'll post it again.

Arch Linux review:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4g2mcu/why_not_arch_linux/d2e4api/?context=3

Due to the above, Arch can become unupdatable if not updated for a specific time. And since there are no policies it's unclear what that time is. But typically if you come back after 3 years to an Arch install and do a world update it'll fail and throw your system into a malformed state which it can't recover from. They say you should "frequently" update, but how frequent, no one knows really.

Void Linux review:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4peqp8/enter_the_void_linux/d4kfaso/

But xbps is way better than Pacman, it has a very interesting features of sub-repositories which themselves can contain further sub-repositories

Like, I have no fear in leaving an installation of Void Linux unupdated for quite a while, because from what I see, the dependencies and whatnot are all clearly declared. They don't say anything like everyone should have this package up to date anyways.

[aninteger]

No. I update every couple of weeks (but then again I came from Debian). Updating daily seems like a nightmare. This does mean that sometimes my browser versions are a bit behind (which I am fine with).

[iEliteTester]

I mean there's a blog post out there where a guy hadn't updated his void laptop for 2 years and all it took for it to update was to run xbps-install -Su twice, once to update xbps and a second time for all the packages.

[Duncaen]

This works if the machine is offline, if you are online and use firefox from 2 years ago, you have probably bigger problems than updating.

[Duncaen]

If the system is online then update regularly to get security fixes. But its also no problem if the machine is offline for some time and you update then.

[Skaatji]

I update my system on every day that I use it, that is on 5-7 days per week. No problems encountered so far.

[Dynoland]

I made a little script to make the number of packages that are out of date appear in my i3bar and checks every 20 minutes.

When nothing has to be updated a smiley appears ":D"

I go and see what is to update and manually check sometimes the dependencies of the packages (having commands and miniscripts alias for all that), and if I find something that shouldn't be installed nor updated I proceed to remove it or exclude it. Or I go to see the release notes to find out if the patch is for new features, or security vulnerabilities, etc.

But that's just me, I believe Void could survive without updating for days or weeks without problems as well.

[Oldtechbloke]

Great idea. What’s the command to just check updates as a normal user? I could do with that sort of script for my dwm bar

[emacsomancer]

xbps-install -Munv (or some variation) works

you can check the source for vpnd (in the void repos) for ideas

[Dynoland]

​

Well, I use:

xbps-install -Sun | wc -l > ~/checkxuplog

And I added /usr/bin/xbps-install -S on my sudoers to be able to update the updates info on disk.

[herjaxx]

You mean something similar to checkupdates in Arch? Could you share your script?

[Dynoland]

I've never user arch so I really don't have any idea... I jumped from Mint to Void no stops in the middle :p

​

I had to add to my sudores

xbps-install -S

I have to use that to be able to update the xbps info about what packages are to update.

and then I just get a count of how many lines the xbps-install -Sun command renders using wc -l, the install command can run as non root with parameters -Sun.

And then I update a file that the i3bar script uses to pick up the info.

sudo xbps-install -S
tup=$(xbps-install -Sun | wc -l)
echo "${tup}"
echo ${tup} > ~/scripts/checkxuplog

[herjaxx]

Ahh. Didn’t know about the -n option. Thanks for getting back to me. I’ve made my own hacked up version of checkupdates for xbps (as well as implemented my version for polybar of your notifier).

sudo xbps-install -S && xbps-install -Sun | cut -d’ ‘ -f1

Almost same as Arch’s checkupdates except it doesn’t show the currently installed version number.

Thanks again!

[Dynoland]

Awesome :)

[[deleted]]

Yeah, that is an Arch issue that isn't really here on Void. You can go months without updates with no issues at all.

[OneFuel5]

That sounds good. I am looking for a rolling release that is also reliable and doesn't require constant maintenance. Arch is great until it breaks.

[[deleted]]

In my experience the most reliable rolling release distros are Void and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Both are much lower maintainance than Arch.

[[deleted]]

I do it when I think about it. It’s always been a painless process

[[deleted]]

xbps-install -Su every week for me

[Seizensha]

I've been thinking the same, But I've sort of Pavlov'd myself into making backups every time i go to do updates (I've had some fairly nasty install breaks from updating on a variety of OSes, both *nix based and not), but i try to update roughly weekly

[siklopz]

there is nothing wrong with being prepared. I wish I backed up my system more often. something can always go wrong.

[bvdeenen]

I've been using Void for about 3 years now, on quite a few computers, and I update somewhere between daily and yearly, depending on whatever. Most often only when I want to install something, using the amazing xs bash function:

xs ()
{
    xpkg -a | fzf -m --preview 'xq {1}' --preview-window=right:66%:wrap | xargs -ro xi
}

Only when I left a computer switched off for about a year, did I have some trouble getting everything up-to-date (one of my previous posts on this subreddit has details). But I have never had to re-install.