No, Archlinux was repeatedly behind with package updates. This even went as far as lagging behind Ubuntu in at least one instance, causing inconvenience and frustration for users which then either had to use other more up-to-date sources for dependencies or package the newer version of dependencies under a different installroot themselves.
This problem is caused by a staff shortage or the average necessary maintanance effort for repo packages. At least one of those 2 causes has to be solved.
It does it's job. I've been using it on the desktop for decades now with never needing to care about anything like that. If it ain't broke, don't fix it...
There's a staff shortage and instead of catching up on packaging tasks the project is building the 19th, what 20th package management system that Linux has now, instead of using battle tested systems like .deb and .rpm?
That is why projects like Arch ... Nixos ... etc ... all eventually become "niche".
Nah, you can keep both. Arch and Alpine are the only two distributions where I bother to build proper packages for everything because their package managers make it so easy to do the right thing.
It might be the 20th package manager in existence, which would be a problem, if Debian maintainers did not release a 20th way to build .debs just a year or two ago, mostly (but not really) deprecating the previous 19 ways. No thanks.
Its not "building a new package management system", "alpm" is literally the foundation of the pacman ecosystem. They are improving this so they _can_ catch up on packaging tasks.
I'm the same as the sibling commenter, I don't want to have another deb or rpm distro. The AUR wouldn't exist without pacman&makepkg.
No, Archlinux was repeatedly behind with package updates. This even went as far as lagging behind Ubuntu in at least one instance, causing inconvenience and frustration for users which then either had to use other more up-to-date sources for dependencies or package the newer version of dependencies under a different installroot themselves.
This problem is caused by a staff shortage or the average necessary maintanance effort for repo packages. At least one of those 2 causes has to be solved.