partial upgrades

arch should be supporting library versioning , right ? if not , then why ? , why it doesn't support library versioning according to pic related , i have to pacman -Syu every time i want to install a single package why i have to upgrade the whole system to install a single package ? why not just install the latest / correct version dependency/library and so on here is the link to the wiki page https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported WHY ARCH , WHY ?

>why i have to upgrade the whole system to install a single package Hehe, I've been asking that question since I switched to Linux, and I must say that I've never liked the concept of distro-specific packages and the traditional paradigm of obtaining software through distro repositories. I'll take AppImages any time, over the madness that is distro-specific packaging. Greybeards can bark at me all day, it doesn't change my opinion on that matter. I've read plenty of arguments, and I'm still in favor of, as much as possible, universal and independent software distribution methods. By the way, it's infuriating to see some cool, cross-platform project, providing static binaries even for Windows, but not for Linux, and instead telling to build it yourself, or get the program from your distro's repositories, only to find out the building process requires some complex environment, or that the suggested distro-specific package is fuarrrking outdated or brings in soykafton of dependencies.

you can do it; you just cant do it blindly. you have to check to see if theres anything that depends on the thing youre upgrading (or any of its dependencies) and upgrade those as well. also, pacman -S packagename is perfectly fine to run without a full update, so you dont normally need to do a system update to install a package, as long as you dont care about having the most recent version of the package (and as long as the binary youre trying to install is still available in the repo).

>>51712 agree 100% linux state of repositories and package management is embarrassing is there a distro that will just install a single package without upgrade and download 3 gigs of updates ? and to be a rolling release distro ofc

>>51757 You can do this in both Debian and Arch.

>>51768 i tried to exactly that with arch , the package installed but didn't start , gave me a dependency error

>>51777 Then the program has mandatory dependencies and/or no stable ABI.

>>51711 That's just a disclaimer since it's possible to break arch and pacman if you upgrade core packages which pacman explicitly uses. Just make sure you don't upgrade core packages. It's probably fine to upgrade partially the community/extra packages but keep in mind these packages themselves may break (like DE breaking or hanging up) but not the entire system. This reduces the amount of complaints. I did break arch by installing some program which had a dependency for core package and I forced installation which caused the system to break and pacman didn't work. They provide library independent pacman now on aur so it's probably a good idea to get that and also they have a wiki now for when that happens so you should be fine either way.

>>51757 >is there a distro that will just install a single package without upgrade and download 3 gigs of updates ? and to be a rolling release distro ofc Install Gentoo

>>51757 how do you even download 3 gigs of updates? maybe you have installed libreoffice or entire manuals/docs of certain programs but that's on you. the easy way is to just make it ignore certain extra repositories like libreoffice and don't install docs or unnecessary stuff. or you can use debian and/or arch with debtap you can also just use flatpak and similar on arch and not have to deal with dependency/library hell.

>>51712 It made sense back when harddrives were 10GB in size and you didn't want duplicated libraries taking up space but now it's just retarded and to be honest a large amount of the issues regular people run into using linux is because of the fuarrrked up package system.