One of the real strengths of Arch is its ability to be customised. Not just in terms of the packages that you choose to install, but how those packages themselves can be patched, altered or otherwise configured to suit your workflow and setup. I have posted previously about, for example, building Vim or hacking PKGBUILDS. What makes all this possible is the wonderful ABS, the Arch Build System.

Essentially a tree of all of the PKGBUILDs (and other necessary files) for the packages in the official repositories, the ABS is the means by which you can easily acquire, compile and install any of the packages on your system:

ABS is made up of a directory tree (the ABS tree) residing under /var/abs. This tree contains many subdirectories, each within a category and each named by their respective package. This tree represents (but does not contain) all official Arch software, retrievable through the SVN system.

I have been using ABS since I started running Arch and it has worked well. I wrote a simple script to check for and download updates when required to help simplify the process and have been generally content with that approach. That isn’t to say that elements of this process couldn’t be improved. One of the small niggles is that the ABS only syncs once a day so there is almost always—for me down here in .nz, anyway—at least a full day’s wait between the package hitting the local mirror and the updated ABS version arriving. The other issue is that you download and sync the entire tree…

That all changed when, at the start of this month, one of the Arch developers, Dave Reisner, opened a thread on the Arch boards announcing asp, the Arch Source Package management tool, a git-based alternative for abs¹.

Basically a 200-line bash script, asp is an improvement over abs insofar as you get the updated PKGBUILDs immediately; you can choose between just pulling the necessary source files (as per abs), or checking out the package branch so that you can create your own development branch and, for example, keep your patch set in git as well.

You can elect to locate the local git repository in a directory of your choosing by exporting ASPROOT, there are Tab completion scripts for bash and zsh and a succinct man page. Overall, for a utility that is only three weeks old, asp is already fulfilling the function of a drop-in replacement; a faster, more flexible tool for building Arch packages from source.

With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie…

Notes

1. The package, not the entire build system…

Creative Commons image, Red Lego Brick by Brian Dill on Flickr.