ABS

ABS, the Arch Build System, pulls PKGBUILD files from Arch Linux's servers. These PKGBUILD files are pretty barebones and optimized as they are (without any significant changes from the original packages). Once you download PKGBUILD files using abs, you can use makepkg to build packages like those found in Arch Linux ARM.

Installing ABS is optional for Arch Linux ARM development and is meant for users that want a specific package not found in the pacman repositories (although you would have to find the reason the package isn't building and fix the PKGBUILD, since we attempt building every package in ABS). This also means that you can rebuild the entire system if you'd like (just like on Gentoo).

To install ABS, run:

pacman -Sy abs

Usage
Before running ABS, take a look at its configuration file: /etc/abs.conf. You'll want to set any variables before you do the initial download of PKGBUILD files.

To download/update the PKGBUILD repositories, downloading to the directory specified in the configuration (/var/abs/ by default):

abs

Note: You should run the command above twice the first time you pull the contents of the ABS.

Building ABS Packages
ABS packages by default are written for the i686 and x86_64 platforms. You'll need to ignore this in order to build on ARM. Here is the catch-all makepkg command you can use to make packages cleanly and efficiently, cleaning up afterwards and downloading any dependencies as well:

makepkg -Acs