[VTimofeenko]

To add to the Gentoo recommendation: ebuilds (effectively, build recipes) take care of pulling in build- and runtime- dependencies. They work with build systems (automake, ninja, meson, etc.) through reusable framework of eclasses, so it's not that hard to write an ebuild to install something that's not in the existing repos. With reference ebuilds and a bit of patience, one can write ebuilds for software written in languages one has no experience in.

To be fair, there's Linux From Scratch, but I found it to be a bit tedious to build out everything and manage the dependencies by hand. Walking through a big dependency DAG manually is not very practical IMO.

There's also Nix, but I am yet to learn how to work with custom patches there. I believe that it's possible, and Nix has a lot of other great features but hasn't been exactly Gentoo-like in my experience.

[johnisgood]

What about Arch Linux or GuixSD? (now GNU Guix System)

[VTimofeenko]

AFAIR, outside AUR Arch is not source-based, so I would imagine it's ability to help with building packages is on par with other binary distros.

No experience with Guix, but its ideas sound very interesting.

[igneo676]

Sure, most of the ecosystem delivers binaries but you can build your own stuff with ABS[1] or download a PKGBUILD from the AUR

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Build_System