Actually, PCLinuxOS doesn’t even update the kernels by itself. The user must explicitly indicate that they want to install a newer version of the same kernel(s).
As for their methodology, PCLinuxOS started off as a fork from Mandriva, so a lot of their procedures were directly taken over from Mandriva. The main differences however were that PCLinuxOS only comes as installable live images ─ which was not the case for Mandriva at the time ─ and that PCLinuxOS also uses a port of Debian’s apt
and synaptic
in combination with .rpm
-based packages, plus that they also enable proprietary graphics drivers by default when supported.
So then we put pressure on upstream. I’m already drafting a formal letter to the Arch Linux package maintainers, of which I took the liberty to sign on both of our behalf. I’m just as committed as you are, @Aragorn. We’re in this together!
I’m going to end the letter like so:
And that’s why you’re DOING IT WRONG.
With all due respect to the everyone at the arrogant and short-sighted Arch Linux team,
Sincerely,
~Aragorn (Come and find me! I dare you.)
Let me spell it for you: A-R-A-G-O-R-N (The hooded, pipe-smoking, penguin wizard with a nasty attitude.)
And winnie too. But this was mostly Aragorn’s idea.
Um, now you’re signing me up for something that I never volunteered for.
Personally, I have no problem with the way Manjaro ─ or for that matter, Arch ─ updates its kernels, because I have simply accepted that updating the entire system by definition implies that one must reboot. It’s the simplest and cleanest scenario, even.
The only thing I do have a problem with in this regard ─ and as has been exposed by this thread ─ is that kernel-alive
comes installed by default, because it violates the integrity of /usr
as a read-only and shareable part of the filesystem hierarchy.
UNIX filesystems always comprise four categories of files and directories, between which there is some overlap: read-only versus writable, and shareable versus non-shareable. For instance…
-
/boot
is read-only but non-shareable; -
/usr
is read-only and shareable; -
/home
is writable and shareable; -
/var
is writeable but non-shareable; - et al.
kernel-alive
and kernel-modules-hook
both violate this, but the difference is that kernel-modules-hook
is an optional package from the Community repo, whereas kernel-alive
comes pre-installed as a package from the Core repo. And that is what’s wrong.