I had several frustrations with any of the Debian-based distributions: mostly that they have definitive releases, and getting recent versions of packages takes a long time. Even Gentoo is starting to get slow about releases, but the overlay system helps for cutting edge things. I've also found that both of these make it somewhat awkward and difficult to package up my own things.

This is where Arch really shines. The arch pacakge manager is a binary package manager, similar to dpkg, but a bit simpler. It manages dependencies and upgrades, and tracking files, although it just drops config files into /etc/filename.pacnew and lets the user manage the updates. Gentoo used to be similar, but several tools now help manage these, and I suspect could be adapted/written for Arch.

But, building Arch packages is really easy. The abs tool will synchronize all of the package descriptors for all of the arch packages that are “trusted”. These can easily be copied somewhere and the package rebuilt, similar to BSD ports. However, the result is a binary package that can be managed by pacman. The Arch User Repository holds packages uploaded by arbitrary users. It allows commentary, and voting, and well-done packages can be promoted into the regular Arch distribution.

I built my first package, of Aegis, which has it's very own package page.

The other thing that is nice about Arch is that the config files (in /etc) are much simpler than most distributions, more like BSD scripts than a typical Linux machine. Most stuff is a bunch of shell variables set in /etc/rc.conf, with a handfull of other things in other files. The installer just puts you in an editor with these files, and it is fairly easy to figure out.

What will be really interesting to see is how well it handles upgrades as time goes on, since this is the difficulty of any distro that does incremental upgrades.