[Novalug] Arch linux impressions?

[Oscar]

I use ArchLinux as my development machine for my job as php developer.  
I haven't run into any significant compatibility breakages, even when I 
was working mainly with Drupal.

If a php app is well supported, the breakages should be caught and fixed 
by its community pretty quickly (at least that was my experience). If an 
app breaks, I'd chalk it up to not having an active developer community 
around it and also relying on legacy PHP behaviors that newer releases 
have fixed (register_globals, the misnamed 'safe_mode', and magic_quotes 
come to mind).

That said, if you need to be cautious about package upgrades with Arch 
you can tell it to ignore upgrades by adding the following option to 
/etc/pacman.conf

IgnorePkg = php