[arch-general] chrooting / LiveCD

[Jorge Almeida]

I've been reading several pieces of documentation about making a
custom LiveCD, in particular the documentation for Archiso. Makefiles
and bash are not my strong suit, so I may have misunderstood
something. Among other things, we need to create a directory, say
"prov", and populate it with an arch system. I tried this:

mkdir -p prov/var/lib/pacman
pacman -r prov -Sy
pacman -r prov  -S base

This seems to work, although it had a complain about the directory
"sys". My question is: to populate a directory with a base system plus
some assorted stuff, can we do it with pacman -r? Or is it necessary
to chroot into prov? (And if so, don't we need to use pacman -r to
have a functional chroot dir to begin with?)
I would understand the need for chroot if we were to compile software
(I read LFS stuff...), to ensure correct library linking. But we're
talking about binary packages...

I'm just trying to get the big (and small) picture...

TIA

Jorge Almeida