[Zancarius]

And I acknowledged that using it on a different distro would be more advisable, although I still stand by my claim that FreeBSD is far more appropriate for ZFS.

I will, however, agree that having no fallback to the prior kernel version is a problem. In practice, it's never caused me much trouble except when I do something stupid like using ZFS from the AUR. initrd generation has historically seemed to be more problematic under Arch, but I'd argue that's mostly fixed with install hooks.

In all honesty, it was probably more the fault of the zfs-dkms packages than it was either the kernel packaging policy or ZoL+DKMS itself (for reasons I elaborated on in my original post).

But, that's also what you get when you use packages from the AUR or using a distro like Arch for something that really only benefits from a wider installation base (like Ubuntu does, for instance).

[kasabali]

I know you acknowledged that using it on a different distro would be more advisable, I just wanted to vent about more broad issue of their packaging policy. Sorry if it wasn't clear.

[Zancarius]

Oh, I understood where you're coming from.

I do agree. There are circumstances where Arch's packaging is brain dead (they only recently, within the last 2 years or so, started validating packages against signatures!). I use it for a number of applications, and as my desktop OS among others. However, I'll freely admit at least part of my choice is perhaps the fault of masochistic tendencies. After all, I migrated to Arch from Gentoo, and I used Gentoo for years! :)

In all honesty, I've been bit more by the initrd and mkinitcpio's failings than the lack of a fallback kernel. That's mostly fixed with packaging hooks that essentially guarantee it will run, but it's still a problem with the ZFS packages and may require running it manually (which is annoying). However, that wasn't always the case, and sometimes the generated initrd would be missing something important. You can imagine what happened next.