Additionally, by the time I started messing with RPM packaging, I had already packaged for Gentoo, Arch, and Ubuntu, so I think I had already developed some intuitions for how to explore packaging systems and their documentation.
Ah, that might have helped I suppose. I haven’t done any sort of packaging in the past so that might have not helped.
but all of those were added to pacman within 2 or 3 years of when I stopped daily driving Arch-based distros.
Ah, that would explain why I hadn’t experienced that myself, having only switched to Arch about a year ago now.
it only examines version constraints for new stuff or updates it's grabbing from the repo. This is part of why 'partial upgrades' aren't supported and all of why your AUR-installed packages are liable to break after `pacman -Syu`, requiring sane AUR wrappers to rebuild your AUR packages after each system upgrade.
Isn’t this, while being slightly inflexible, reasonably logical with Arch being rolling release? I was under the impression that you weren’t supposed to upgrade anything individually, as that upgrade might cause the need for a newer version of some dependency, which could break other packages.
make it easy to tell when an upgrade or installation might require you to change the 'supplier' of a given package
This has worked fine for me with packages installed from the AUR (through yay), although I can’t think of any examples, but I think it’s only happened once or twice.
Honestly I should probably try running Arch again for a while to help update what I think of pacman.
I would recommend that you do, as Arch is the best distribution ever! :P
Thanks for sharing that information, as I’ve never heard anyone talking about pacman at that time, so I’d assumed it was always like it is now. It was very enlightening.