however come first boot up and i try to install awesome window manager. find out i need to MANUALLY download tarballs, unpack them and run:
makepkg -s --asroot
pacman -U /path/to/package.tar.gz
did that for awesome then it wanted dependency X. downloaded dependency X. it wants dependency Y .etc... I gave up on the 5th dependency... what is the point of a centralised package manager if I'm forced to do this??
Whenever I'm missing dependencies they get installed automatically along with the package so you are probably doing something wrong. You should ask for help in the official forums, you'll probably get a quick answer. The only thing I can think of is that your pacman is outdated, you don't have cairo-xcb installed (which you also have to get from AUR) or maybe you tried installing the tarball instead of the resulting pkg.tar.xz as your post implies.
Or if using makepkg is too much trouble entirely you could download an
AUR helper. They are basically like pacman for the AUR. To my knowledge, the most popular one is yaourt.
why not just have a user repo if you don't want to add some packages to core.
and why is it so hard to provide a package for awesome- there's 10 user contributed packages.
Not sure why you can't get binaries from the AUR but my guess is because of security. If all those thousands of packages were readily accessible by pacman it would be a huge mess. There would be lots of bs packages with malicious code like friefox or python3 just waiting to get installed by mistake.
About awesome specifically, it doesn't have a package in the supported repos because, even though it's very popular, one of its dependencies is also in the AUR (cairo-xcb). The cairo package would have to be voted in before awesome can be promoted.
pacman is also weird as hell to use. why not have:
pacman -Qi X => pacman showinfo X
pacman -Sy => pacman update
pacman -Ss X => pacman search X
why these people always have to contrive things?
Huh? Abbreviating arguments is common practice as far as I know. And as chmod explained, you can easily create aliases for whatever command you don't care to type or remember.