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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

What Debian has nailed in the last 10 years is the package management situation that is so smooth. This is why I’m leaving Arch, everything breaks sometimes or a dep won’t upgrade for this or that reason. Debian you install and the package probably has a pretty good initial config and works. Any packages that aren’t recent enough can be built usually because the toolchain versions are probably recent enough. So it really is a nice experience.

Not even Apple products have that solid of a package situation.

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I always have such a difficult time messing with packages on debian. On arch, there is a single PKGBUILD file, and it's basically the simplest thing anyone could think of which makes it bliss to work with. On the other hand, debian/rules is a complete mess, apt-get update is notoriously slow, and I have not had good experiences with dpkg-buildpackage compared to makepkg.

Really? I have had package manager failing experiences since I installed Arch. About 1-3 times per month yay will fail requiring me to use pacman to update. Once I run pacman I can run yay to update my AUR deps when the selling point of yay is that it’s a completely pacman-compatible interface. It’s package situation is so fuzzy though that the community actively encourages you to install multiple package managers. There’s a 3rd pm I can’t remember the name, just a lot of effort for simple things. Often the advice is to read the wiki pages which is nice but Debian I rarely have to read a wiki page or search because everything installs with sane defaults, doesn’t require building for the most part, doesn’t ask me if I want to keep make dependencies when I do build with a default to yes. Arch leaves files behind when I uninstall. Arch doesn't let me know I have extra dependencies I don’t need. Pacman requires reading quite a bit of manpages to understand how to do simple tasks. Arch just feels like a messy experience.

To a great extent, the experience of using Arch is the experience of reading the Wiki and doing what it says. I say this without any judgement implied: if you don’t want to read the Wiki, Arch is not for you. Debian is an excellent distribution.

Personably I started using Arch because of its excellent Wiki, after three Fedora updates in a row failed on me and I found myself over and over in the Arch Wiki getting answers.

Yeah Arch is fine if you don’t mind stopping to search for an answer. Most times it’s in the wiki, a lot of times it’s a library upgrade that just causes the pm to fail. Fine if you know what to bang on but I got tired of having to bang.

Yes, there are some wrinkles in upgrading packages on Arch, like you said. I've had to manually install archlinux-keyring with pacman. Ive had to manually upgrade yay because a shared library it is dynamically linked to was upgraded. I've had to rm -rf my gpg cache due before.

But my post was primarily focusing on the experience of building / modifying packages. To elaborate just a bit more as an example, the Debian docs claim one can use this environment variable to control certain things when building a package.

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS='nostrip noopt debug'

What they don't mention, is that these environment variable values are only enabled on a case-by-case basis for every package. Which means, you can't just expect to be able to easily rebuild an arbitrary package without cleaning first, i.e. doing an incremental build. You have to look at debian/rules, which is highly unstructured (unlike PKGBUILD), uses tons of DEB_ makefile variables which I have no understanding of.

Aren’t Debian and Arch philosophic opposites though?

Arch is bleeding edge yet permanently issue prone, Debian is stable and conservative/slow in updating?

Seems odd to jump from one end of the spectrum to another (I use Debian and Mint mostly but have respect for the Arch project’s aims)

In the five years I have used Arch, I have not had a single issue.

> Debian is stable and conservative/slow in updating?

Sid isn't.

> Arch is bleeding edge yet permanently issue prone

What were you doing with Arch where you had this experience? I’ve been using it for more than ten years on a variety of hardware and everything has always just worked, but I see this complaint a lot and I’m confused about where it comes from.

Oh I can’t change distros now because of philosophy?

It’s funny, this really isn’t my complaint with Arch. It’s more, “ugh, didn’t you just update LibreOffice last week? Another 2 gigabytes?” I want to be clear that Arch has been fantastically stable for me on a variety of hardware, for over a decade.

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