Benefits of versioned archives over VCS for deployments: easily checksum and cryptographically sign; easily integrate with existing distribution specific package databases; deploy without requiring a VCS (and all its dependencies, including maintained and accessible VCS repo-hosting deployment infrastructure), probable security and speed benefits of the resulting (ie. minimalist) approach (both at the level of the host and the network).
Personally I use a combination of versioned archives and named and versioned target environments, each of which can be tested both individually and in combination (including regression tests). This works well for me.
Theres many package management systems which sucks at this.
I suppose then that you mean "rpm" or "debs" or the like. Not the "language package management system" as the previous poster mentioned. Because I've yet to see one that truly support more than tar xzf <list of deps>.
Even when they have signing support none of the packages are signed, anyways.
Benefits of versioned archives over VCS for deployments: easily checksum and cryptographically sign; easily integrate with existing distribution specific package databases; deploy without requiring a VCS (and all its dependencies, including maintained and accessible VCS repo-hosting deployment infrastructure), probable security and speed benefits of the resulting (ie. minimalist) approach (both at the level of the host and the network).
Personally I use a combination of versioned archives and named and versioned target environments, each of which can be tested both individually and in combination (including regression tests). This works well for me.