From ArchWiki

[edit] Concerning the filtering of vetoed packages

I'm no expert (yet! ;) ), so i'll just put this in a comment for now, but this might be a somewhat more elegant to filter out vetoed packages from basepackages:

for p in $BASEPKGS ; do
        # grep in $BASEVETO for $p using word bounderies ( "\< \>" )
        if [ "x$( echo $BASEVETO | grep "\<$p\>" )" == "x" ] ; then
                echo $p >> basepacks
        fi
done

It looks cleaner... Don't know if it's slower than the current filter, though. As it does involve grep.

Regards, JP

[edit] two issues

At first, great work! Didn't try it but looks great and helpful.

Then, you should update the script from using current to core, as the repositories changed. Now it still works, cause there are still links.

The other issue: The path to the packages list doesn't work: ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/core/os/i686/setup/packages.txt should be ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/core/os/i686/packages.txt, without "setup/".

I don't want to mess around in your script, cause I'm not that experienced bash-scripter. Just pointed out this two issues.

Cheers, CW

[edit] Little fix

Synchronising package database would fail due to a missing $DESTDIR/var/lib/pacman directory. Thus

mkdir -p $DESTDIR/var/lib/pacman

Cheers