Arch, the second (yoghurt)

What I forgot to mention in my first post on Arch : you can, if you like, refrain from binary updates altogether and instead use an entirely source-oriented approach to package management. The "Arch Build System" (ABS) is completely analogous to the ports system, which dominates package management in any self-respecting *bsd. 😉 Upon installing the ABS system, you'll get an ABS tree in /var/abs, are able to create binary packages via makepkg, and install them with pacman. Compared to FreeBSD [1] I'd call the Arch procedure exceedingly simple and transparent.

In addition, Arch has something special in store for you: the "Arch User Repository" (AUR). The AUR contains source packages approved and prepared for build by the Arch community. To simplify usage, Arch programmers created yaourt (for our linguistically challenged American friends, that's French for yoghurt 😄 ). Yaourt is a wrapper for pacman and, furthermore, searches the AUR. It automates the build of binary packages from the source to such a degree that one needs to be quite observant to see the difference from a purely binary install 😉 .

[1] "portmaster -La"? "portmanager -su"? What about portupgrade? Of course, only one of these, but either one after "portsnap fetchupdate", and "portaudit -Fda". Of course. Naturally. )