[aleden]

Yes, there are some wrinkles in upgrading packages on Arch, like you said. I've had to manually install archlinux-keyring with pacman. Ive had to manually upgrade yay because a shared library it is dynamically linked to was upgraded. I've had to rm -rf my gpg cache due before.

But my post was primarily focusing on the experience of building / modifying packages. To elaborate just a bit more as an example, the Debian docs claim one can use this environment variable to control certain things when building a package.

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS='nostrip noopt debug'

What they don't mention, is that these environment variable values are only enabled on a case-by-case basis for every package. Which means, you can't just expect to be able to easily rebuild an arbitrary package without cleaning first, i.e. doing an incremental build. You have to look at debian/rules, which is highly unstructured (unlike PKGBUILD), uses tons of DEB_ makefile variables which I have no understanding of.