I've provisioned and maintained dozens of servers all running Arch, and currently have four home PCs running it. I've found Pacman to be one of the easier and more pleasant package managers to live with.
You can sort through tens of thousands of existing PKGBUILDs on the AUR [1], which typically makes it quick and easy to start packaging software for Arch. You can even sync a flat text file database of all official Arch packages with abs [2]. The ability to reverse engineer every PKGBUILD for a wide variety of software is a major plus in my book.
Writing a PKGBUILD takes roughly the same effort as compiling software from source with a bash script. PKGBUILDs are simple to write, and there's just enough "magic" in Pacman to keep things sane.
Nine times out of ten, the PKGBUILD writing process boils down to copy/pasting directions from README or INSTALL files. It's like a bash script, except more 'done-for-you'. Finding exact dependencies is typically a cinch with the AUR and tools like packer.
Maintaining a rolling distro can be a labor of love, but if you love the system, you'll find it may significantly increase your overall sanity. It's another way of doing things, but I consider choice of distro to be one of the more important decisions to make, and IME, Arch has been such a significant departure from other distros that not trying it in a serious capacity is roughly equivalent to not trying Vim / Emacs ever in your career. Which is to say, I think it's a mistake not to at least see what it may offer you, especially if you're in any doubt.
I hope my positivity is only seen as that: positivity, and not overzealous dedication to one specific toolset. Arch probably isn't a panacea, nor will I claim that it's a perfect fit for your way of doing things. But I have never found something as pleasant as Pacman to work with. In addition, I never would've even tried Arch if I hadn't been slightly flustered by the seemingly irrational exuberance random sysadmins displayed for the system.
You can sort through tens of thousands of existing PKGBUILDs on the AUR [1], which typically makes it quick and easy to start packaging software for Arch. You can even sync a flat text file database of all official Arch packages with abs [2]. The ability to reverse engineer every PKGBUILD for a wide variety of software is a major plus in my book.
Writing a PKGBUILD takes roughly the same effort as compiling software from source with a bash script. PKGBUILDs are simple to write, and there's just enough "magic" in Pacman to keep things sane.
Nine times out of ten, the PKGBUILD writing process boils down to copy/pasting directions from README or INSTALL files. It's like a bash script, except more 'done-for-you'. Finding exact dependencies is typically a cinch with the AUR and tools like packer.
Maintaining a rolling distro can be a labor of love, but if you love the system, you'll find it may significantly increase your overall sanity. It's another way of doing things, but I consider choice of distro to be one of the more important decisions to make, and IME, Arch has been such a significant departure from other distros that not trying it in a serious capacity is roughly equivalent to not trying Vim / Emacs ever in your career. Which is to say, I think it's a mistake not to at least see what it may offer you, especially if you're in any doubt.
I hope my positivity is only seen as that: positivity, and not overzealous dedication to one specific toolset. Arch probably isn't a panacea, nor will I claim that it's a perfect fit for your way of doing things. But I have never found something as pleasant as Pacman to work with. In addition, I never would've even tried Arch if I hadn't been slightly flustered by the seemingly irrational exuberance random sysadmins displayed for the system.
1: https://aur.archlinux.org
2: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Abs