Answers to: Source based Linux distribution or build system allow all cutting edge package. (not Linux From Scratch) ?

Answer by Jinx

Jinx — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:22:59 -0400

I'll second the Arch Linux suggestion, it's truely a great distribution that is very clean and lightweight yet packed with nice features, as mentioned AUR (Arch User Repository) contains thousands of submissions for package builds, the build scripts are capable of grabbing the source from tarballs or cvs/svn/git/bzr/you name it, and if what you desire is not already submitted then writing the build script is a breeze, there are also tools available to compliment the package manager so that these custom built packages can be kept up-to-date easily. If you require more power and control, the best of both worlds with binary packages and package builds from source, also the ability to modify and build any of the binary packages provided from the main repositories via ABS (Arch Build System) then definately check out this distribution.

Arch Linux Website

Answer by XavierP

XavierP — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:11:36 -0400

Slackware + sbopkg/slackpkg possibly?

Are you looking for a link to the package's homesite rather than a repository? If so, thats a massively tall order since all distros do some repackaging to make the files installable and searchable by the package managers.

Does Rock Linux match what you need?

Answer by Paul

Paul — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:02:31 -0400

With Arch Linux, anything in the AUR repository is downloaded from the project source and compiled in most cases.

Answer by wsherman

wsherman — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:21:33 -0400

Gentoo is also providing package kept in mirror, not directly from project repository.

Gentoo stores ebuilds in the portage repository. Ebuilds are scripts which specify build and runtime dependencies, the location of the source code, and other things to successfully compile, link, and install an application or library. But the source code itself is not stored in portage. An ebuild can fetch source code directly from CVS, SVN and GIT among other things.

Answer by acid_kewpie

acid_kewpie — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:57:05 -0400

Not a going concern AFAIK, but this reminded me of ESR's Shipper tool - http://www.catb.org/~esr/shipper/ which did attempt to create a standard interface to a number of code repositories. This is / was more for pushing code in, than pulling it out though.

Personally I'm not too sure this is really that good an idea as the basis of a distro as the distro developers have no control over the code going into the system, meaning that things could work lovely or be horribly broken at any point in time.

Answer by r0000t

r0000t — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:54:23 -0400

SUSE Studio allows you to create a customized linux "distro", based off of selected repositories. Essentially you start with the raw SUSE OS and then select from thousands of packages, boot up graphics, etc.

http://susestudio.com/

Other then that, I can't think of anything that would be in that general category.