How do you keep your arch linux templates from breaking?

User Support General
1

While I’ve had good luck with the Fedora and Debian templates being stable, I’ve never been able to keep an Arch Linux template around for longer than a couple of months.

When updating through the Qubes updater, after some time it always either stops being able to update due to broken dependencies or updates “successfully” in such a way that the whole template stops being able to boot.

How do you keep your arch linux templates from breaking? Is there any better way than just keeping backups and hoping nothing goes wrong?

2

The problem with arch, as with any rolling distro, or with something
like Debian testing, is that they move fast. Faster than the Qubes team
can keep generating updated packages.
The best I can advise is that if an update breaks, roll back to the
previous iteration and wait for updated packages. Qubes makes it easy to
do this with qvm-volume revert : see the man page for detail
I have some long term arch templates that are fine.