The Arch Build System is utterly wonderful. All you do is define a PKGBUILD and it will handle downloading sources, compiling them, and creating a package. It's so simple that once you've done it a couple times it's basically fuck-all effort to create them for whatever you want.
Then all I need to do is run pacaur -y dmenu-dogs (pacaur is an AUR helper, which automates the process of downloading the PKGBUILD + any patches/local sources, running makepkg, and installing it) on my other boxes and it sorts everything out for me.
Pacman itself is also very lightweight and fast, and has a very simple and clearly separated API. Want to know what package owns a file? pacman -Qo /usr/lib/blah. Want to check a package has all it's files? pacman -Qk mypackage. Anything removing is -R, anything querying is -Q, anything installing (syncing) is -S.
The last thing I love about Arch is the wiki. It is fucking AMAZING. There are well explained and thought out posts detailing how to install and configure a vast, vast range of software. I even refer to it when I'm not using Arch.
And installing yaourt[1] makes using PKGBUILDs from AUR and ABS, and binary packages from the repos amazingly transparent and fast. I've never heard of such a level of flexibility on package management.
For instance, you can install the precompiled chromium from the repos with yaourt -S chromium; if you need to recompile it from ABS, throw a yaourt -Sb chromium and you are done. To install the binary build from AUR, yaourt -S chromium-browser-bin will do it.
Thanks for writing that. Arch Wiki is amazing. Ubuntu has also started writing and updating their wiki. AUR still makes your life easier for examples android-sdk, android-sdk-platform-tools, android-udev, and android-eclipse will install complete android development environment including ADT Plugin, etc.
So say I wanted to have dmenu on my systems with a custom colour scheme. I make the colour scheme changes as a patch and then create a package on the AUR like so: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dm/dmenu-dogs/PKGBUILD
Then all I need to do is run pacaur -y dmenu-dogs (pacaur is an AUR helper, which automates the process of downloading the PKGBUILD + any patches/local sources, running makepkg, and installing it) on my other boxes and it sorts everything out for me.
Pacman itself is also very lightweight and fast, and has a very simple and clearly separated API. Want to know what package owns a file? pacman -Qo /usr/lib/blah. Want to check a package has all it's files? pacman -Qk mypackage. Anything removing is -R, anything querying is -Q, anything installing (syncing) is -S.
The last thing I love about Arch is the wiki. It is fucking AMAZING. There are well explained and thought out posts detailing how to install and configure a vast, vast range of software. I even refer to it when I'm not using Arch.