Arch really does have the most straightforward packaging system. Can you write a Bash script? Cool. You can package your application for Arch very easily.
Yeah, while lots of people have plenty of other reasons for using Arch. The packaging system is my personal favorite. I have made packages for deb and rpm based systems before, but Arch is just so dead simple with little scripts preinstalled to make it even easier.
Absolutely agree, the wholeapt-get upgrade (or however, I always messed it up!) was annoying to me, and I switched to an arch distro (Endeavour) and I'm super happy with it. It's my only machine and it is awesome
Unfortunately, from my testing back when I used Arch, a lot of packages in the AUR didn't meet packaging guidelines, so while quickly writing a PKGBUILD is easy, writing it correctly requires a bit more effort, especially regarding the dependencies. IIRC namcap is often enough, but ideally packages should be built in clean chroots as well to make sure they build everywhere
David might be using git's send email, which he likely has set up to have a max line length of about 80, because that's what the kernel developers require.