> > package managers are pretty similar. The major difference with Arch is you're heavily recommended not to do partial upgrades, but pacman will do it if you really want to. That's a difference in update philosophy between batched releases and rolling releases, not a difference in the package managers.

> No it’s a difference in package managers. Pacman doesn’t take into account library versions when resolving dependencies, it’s why partial upgrades aren’t supported because the only way to ensure every package you have installed is linked against the version of its dependencies you have installed is to have every package on your system come from a snapshot in time of the whole repo package tree.

Ding, ding, ding! This is the same dumb behavior that Homebrew has for the same dumb reason that the lead maintainer discussed here on HN just a few days ago.[1]

Pacman is extraordinarily naive as a package manager. And that's just talking about the absolute bare minimum, main job of a package manager, never mind the more peripheral features (like repo management) that are commonly incorporated into modern package managers like dnf and zypper nowadays, the lack of useful abstractions and metadata (like the representation of vendor and vendor change), or the comparatively obtuse CLI vs. modern subcommand interfaces.

If Arch Linux is for users who want to understand their systems, both because having them set it up themselves is supposed to ensure they understand it better and because its tooling is supposed to be kept simple so as to make it easier to understand, one would think these differences would be more transparent to Arch users. But perhaps in many cases it's been a while since they used other tools, and they never dug that deep into them.

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1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081756