6 ms·

The biggest draw of Arch for me is pacman. The system itself is incredibly simple (and incredibly fast), but more importantly, it's really easy to design and co

The biggest draw of Arch for me is pacman. The system itself is incredibly simple (and incredibly fast), but more importantly, it's really easy to design and compile your own packages for it. To make a Debian package, you have to edit a bunch of control files, run a bunch of shell scripts, and then it packs all that up in some obscure cpio-based format. With Arch, on the other hand, it's one program - makepkg - with only one or two "control files" (PKGBUILD and maybe an install script), and it generates a nice, easily-inspectable .pkg.tar.gz file. Plus you can find just about any package you could want in the AUR, and if not, you can find one that builds like it and then modify it to work with your package.

Rusky 15y ago
Definitely agree. The AUR makes it really easy to manage software not in the official repositories- without that it becomes difficult to keep track of what's installed and often impossible to uninstall. However, it would be nice if pacman used signed packages, especially in light of the recent kernel.org situation.
- Adaptive 15y ago
  Not done yet, but I think pacman 4.0 has signing support. I also hope the recent events will spur continued development here.
  - zobzu 15y ago
    signing support is the only missing thing IMO
- hwkns 15y ago
  Package signing is in the works: http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-3-pacman/ http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-3-pacma...
lmz 15y ago
Nitpicking here, but it's RPM that uses the CPIO based format. Debian .debs are ar archives with control and data tarballs. The data.tar.gz is pretty easily inspectable.
j-kidd 15y ago
Also, in Debian, you have one guy maintaining a bunch of core packages: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573745#310 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573745#310 If you deploy Debian/Ubuntu on servers, your fate is pretty much dependent on this guy, unless you roll your own packages, which wastes precious time.
- blasdel 15y ago
  Wow, he solely controls bash, binutils, build-essential, python, readline, etc: http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/maintainer/d/doko@debian.org.html http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/maintainer/d/doko@debian.org....

Rusky 15y ago

Definitely agree. The AUR makes it really easy to manage software not in the official repositories- without that it becomes difficult to keep track of what's installed and often impossible to uninstall. However, it would be nice if pacman used signed packages, especially in light of the recent kernel.org situation.

Adaptive 15y ago
Not done yet, but I think pacman 4.0 has signing support. I also hope the recent events will spur continued development here.
- zobzu 15y ago
  signing support is the only missing thing IMO
hwkns 15y ago
Package signing is in the works: http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-3-pacman/ http://allanmcrae.com/2011/08/pacman-package-signing-3-pacma...

lmz 15y ago

Nitpicking here, but it's RPM that uses the CPIO based format. Debian .debs are ar archives with control and data tarballs. The data.tar.gz is pretty easily inspectable.

j-kidd 15y ago

Also, in Debian, you have one guy maintaining a bunch of core packages: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573745#310 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=573745#310 If you deploy Debian/Ubuntu on servers, your fate is pretty much dependent on this guy, unless you roll your own packages, which wastes precious time.

blasdel 15y ago
Wow, he solely controls bash, binutils, build-essential, python, readline, etc: http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/maintainer/d/doko@debian.org.html http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/maintainer/d/doko@debian.org....