That said, the ABS tree and the AUR in arch, combined with the general avoidance of patches, do make arch one of the easiest places to play with bleeding edge software. With the toolchain in place, so many packages are just a one line version number change to get any particular version building. Whereas building packages from source on ubuntu/fedora/etc can be an uphill battle depending how entrenched the distro's patches and inter version dependencies are. (Though most of the time, building things via make and sticking them in some directory is acceptable, arch really does make building packages easier than other distros)