Package Manager to compile all packages as in Gentoo

Question

Hello,
I love Arch and was looking to get my hands dirty, I there a way where I can compile all the packages that I install like in Gentoo rather than using only the pre-compiled i686 packages? I looked at ABS but was not sure how to keep track of the changes, I believe I simply cant do '-Syu' with ABS. I am just looking for something like Yaourt or Packer AUR helpers but for all the packages from core/extra/community.
Thank You
Gopi

Answer 1

RichAustin wrote:I'm perhaps being a bit dumb here but why not just use Gentoo instead? I am actually quite serious here since I wouldn't have thought there was a major difference between the two except you compile everything in Gentoo. I can't really see why you would want to find a workaround to do what you can already do in Gentoo.
I recently spent many days relearning the Gentoo way, did a stage3 Gentoo install alongside my Arch system, compiled a custom kernel from pf-sources, updated world, spent time reading the forum and web pages.  I won't try to replay "what I found wrong in Gentoo" except for the refrain "Gentoo is broken." That was my take. I found important things broken for long periods with no attention. People rude to each other.   I won't do that scene...
Arch may have a smaller developer team but I've experienced a generally high level of cooperation and discipline here. I've seen complaints about the forum here being moderated -- to me that seems to work for our good.  Thanks to the moderators who keep this place civil and rational!
There seems to be a good knowledge base here and the principle of always keeping up-to-date with the upstream releases forces the developers to constantly parse upstream information to roll a coherent stream of Arch packages. The knowledge here is as good as anywhere.  I just don't expect Arch Linux to be an integrated operating system, like Debian stable or Ubuntu.  In my experience it gets almost as much stability as Debian Testing by virtue of quickly taking in the upstream releases, which then fix the bugs that Arch never has to fix ourselves.  We trust upstream   I didn't see a clear policy in Gentoo -- some upstream releases are held back forever as Gentoo devs argue over it.
I have found it possible to use Arch as the base for a customized, locally compiled system; it's possible to do that with abs/AUR and makepkg.  I've developed my own style.  In place of USE flags I use meld to carry forward my local changes from my local PKGBUILD to the newly released Arch PKGBUILD.  I don't modify many pkgbuilds and mostly just remember which ones I change, for example to exclude gconf from my system. (It's a KDE / Xmonad desktop with a lot of audio tools).
I haven't found it possible or desirable to do bulk builds on Arch. I encounter quite a few pkgbuilds from abs that do not build straight away, sometimes because the package won't build against the library that is in abs at the same time, sometimes because patches are missing or checksums are incorrect:  it becomes clear that the released binary packages are not built from the daily abs update. That would be the job of a build server that takes in abs and spits out a complete set of binaries. That is the missing step that I do myself: take in abs and compile a (daily) coherent set of binaries from it (with local mods). It is not like Gentoo.  I don't think that the Arch team tries to guarantee that the their binaries can be re-built perfectly from abs, so if you try to use abs rather than pacman -S you need to understand that and accept the responsibility. It works well enough for me.