One of the strongest points of Linux is the package management. In 2025, the world of Linux package management is very varied, with several options available, each with their advantages and trade-offs over the others.
One of the strongest points of Linux is the package management. In 2025, the world of Linux package management is very varied, with several options available, each with their advantages and trade-offs over the others.
That’s just wrong. Pacman has hooks, and easy hooks are one of the reasons Pacman is loved. In a normal weekly upgrade I see Pacman run over 30 hooks. I do not think simply not updating user-modified config files is just the bare minimum needed.
I think this boils down to Arch’s philosophy: the users should know their system, and when something could break things, don’t assume things and do it automatically; have the user do it instead. Thus when shipping config updates to a user who had already changed their config, Arch does not overwrite the configs and instead ships the updated vanilla config with a .pacnew suffix. The user is expected to review such pacnews, a process that’s just like normal git merge conflicts when you use the pacdiff tool.
In that specific context I was still thinking about how you need to run
mysql_upgradeafter an update, not the regular post upgrade scripts. And Arch does keep those relatively simple. As I said, Arch won’t restart your database for you, and also won’t runmysql_upgradebecause it also doesn’t preconfigure a user for itself to do that. And it also doesn’t initialize/var/lib/mysqlfor you either upon installation. Arch only does maintenance tasks like rebuild your font cache, create system users, reload systemd. And if those scripts fail, it just moves on, it’s your job to read the log and fix it. It doesn’t fail the package installation, it just tells you to go figure it out yourself.Debian distros will bounce your database and run the upgrade script for you, and if you use unattended upgrades it’ll even randomly bounce in the middle of the night because it pull a critical security update that probably don’t apply to you anyway. It’ll bail out mid dist-upgrade and leave you completely fucked, because it couldn’t restart a fucking database. It’s infuriating, I’ve even managed to get apt to be incapable of deleting a package (or reinstalling it)/because it wanted to run a pre-remove script that I had corrupted in a crash. Apt completely hosed, dpkg completely hosed, it was a pain in the ass.
With the Arch philosophy I still need to fix my database, but at least the rest of my system gets updated perfectly and I can still use pacman to install the tools I need to fix the damn database. I have all those issues with Debian because apt tries to do way too fucking much for its own good.
The Arch philosophy works. I can have that automated, if I asked for it and set up a hook for it.