As far as I'm informed, it's the second type only. You can't even fetch specific package versions (Pacman keeps old packages around if you ever need to downgrad

As far as I'm informed, it's the second type only. You can't even fetch specific package versions (Pacman keeps old packages around if you ever need to downgrade to a previously installed version, but that's it). Of course, I could be missing something there :) So yeah, you probably won't be using it for a web server or the like, but I wouldn't imply from that that Arch is to insecure to use as a dev machine. As far as bugs go: There's a testing phase/repo for new packages, so it's not really likely that an upgrade will do much damage (and as I said, you can still downgrade if necessary).