Introducing Lowarch - Arch for low-end systems

Question

Some of you might remember that I mentioned my plans of making an Arch install cd for low end systems. I've come quite far with this project now.
First, I must say that it was a lot harder than I first expected. So I can say I have learned a lot in the process.
Second, before I start ramblig about where I am in the process, I'll just outline what the plan is:
The best Linux distribution is Arch Linux, because of it's speed, simplicity and elegance in design. I often get hold of some old laptops which are too old for Arch (i586 normally, but also i486). I have tried a lot of distros made for low end systems, but I always end up thinking, ah how wonderful it would have been to have Arch on this. It would have been the perfect distro for this machine.
And the more I thought about it, I realised that even though Arch is perfect for super modern systems, it would be even more perfect for old systems, because of it's speed and simplicity, and not least the choice of packages.
Some have started projects to port Arch to i586. I don't think that is the best solution. A lot of Arch isn't really useful on these machines. Therefore I decided to make a new distro based on Arch, where the main difference is the choice of packages. You don't want to run a video editor on a i586. For now I've called the distro Lowarch.
Here's what I have done so far:
1st try:
Oh, I just change the compiler flags to i486 in /etc/makepkg.conf and start compiling all the packages. That worked great. Almost everything in base compiled fine. Until I started to notice the strange i686's coming up in all the ./configure outputs, and when I tried to install some of it on my i586, a lot of Illegal instruction messages came up.
After doing some research, I understood that some programs make static links to libraries, all of which, of course, are i686 coded on my system. I realised I needed to do this differently. Of course I didn't want to do all the compiling on a 486 machine.
2nd try:
I made a Cross Linux From Scratch system, compiled for i486. Even that I had to make twice, for a lot of programs check what processor they are running on and compile for that. So the second time I used a so-called uname-hack. A small kernel module which makes the kernel report that it's running on an i486 machine.
When I had a basic build system, I compiled pacman, and started to build packages. This time I had to take care of the order for dependencies to work out. First kernel-headers, glibc, etc. I installed one package at a time into an empty directory with the pacman -r option.
After having the base system compiled, I booted it, and (using the uname-hack still) continued to compile the other packages in current, and the ones that I wanted from extra.
It was really hard, since a lot of packages just don't compile with recent glibc and gcc. I have learned a lot about writing small patches just to make gcc happy or take away symbols not used anymore etc. The dependencies in the pkgbuilds are not always correct when it comes to building packages. Sometimes, and this is the most frustrating, packages seems to build correctly, but because some library wasn't installed or whatever, a few files are missing from the package, and I have no way to know, untill something goes wrong. Often this wrong is a package not compiling because include files are missing.
Another problem was to make an installer. I decided I just wanted a simple installer, like Arch has. So I compiled busybox and made an almost exact copy of the 0.7.2 install cd, just compiled for i486, and with my package selection on it.
What's left to do:
1. Look more closely at the package selection. If there are people who are interested in this we can have some nice discussions about this. There are a lot of packages I just don't know what is for, and therefore I don't dare take them away.
2. Clean up the PKGBUILDs, e.g take away references it the i686 and 64bit  arch.
3. Compile the whole set of packages again, just in case.
4. Releasing it.
I've set up a wordpress page at lowarch.linuxophic.org, which is empty now, but where I'll put out a link to the iso when it's ready.

Answer 1

Yes, I think it would be smart to check out the PKGBUILD once in a while and see if they are still able to build packages. It seems this is only done when new releases arrive.
The thing about old programs not compiling with newer glibc and gcc or other libraries is unavoidable, and there's an unending stream of patches to address this issue. If a package hasn't had a release for a year, it's quite common that a change in a library it depends on will break the compilation. When or if new releases come, they should usually fix this.
Of course, PKGBUILDs of current packages should work with a current system, not with a system from last year, if their supposed to be of any use. But it's a huge job to keep this up to date at all times, and you need some programming skills to do it, and I would rather have the devs focus on more important things, like updating packages and making everything work even better.