[Aboriginal] ulfs-bootstrap, shrinking LFS.

[David Seikel]

On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 01:15:17 -0500 Rob Landley <rlandley at parallels.com>
wrote:

> On 04/01/2011 09:04 AM, David Seikel wrote:
> > I'm not volunteering, I got enough work to do.  Only dabbling in the
> > stuff I need to, and contributing back what I can.
> 
> This is why I want to do distro bootstrapping.  Maintaining package
> repositories is something _other_ people do, and do it well, and I
> want to leverage that work, not duplicate it.
> 
> Even LFS (and BLFS) are pretty much "repositories somebody else
> maintains".  They're as simple as you can get doing that (fixed
> package selection), but I don't have to work out what depends on what
> and how to configure invoke the builds.  (I just have to debug it. :)

Want me to send you the few BLFS scripts I made for my project?

> In theory Gentoo's emphasis on building from source made it a good
> candidate for bootstrapping systems on arbitrary targets.  In practice
> the way they set up their repository individual annotates every single
> package with every single platform it's been tested to run on.  (To
> add a new platform, you have to touch every package ebuild file in
> the whole tree.)
> 
> That's insanely stupid for native builds on arbitrary targets you've
> already bootstrapped on.  In order to go forward, I need to REDESIGN
> THE PORTAGE TREE and push the changes upstream.

Ouch.

> >> Readline there's a bsd-licensed replacement I'd prefer to use out
> >> of sheer spite for the FSF, and idealy busybox should export that
> >> functionality anyway.
> > 
> > I'd like to look at that readline replacement, though I'd be just as
> > happy to not need it for my current project.
> 
> There's a couple of them, but this one looks reasonable at first
> glance:
> 
>   https://github.com/antirez/linenoise

That looked good, especially the fork that made it more like a drop in
replacement for readline.  Even the authors of readline say in the man
page "It's too big and too slow."

> >>> First problem, iana-etc needs the real gawk, it uses fancy options
> >>> that the busybox awk does not support.  So put gawk back in.
> >>
> >> Poke the busybox gawk maintainer about that.
> > 
> > I may just cut iana-etc down to the few ports I actually need for
> > this project.  The next project will need it for sure.  I've not
> > actually looked at what iana-etc uses gawk for, but it does smell
> > of overkill to just create two text files.  Why not just ship the
> > two text files?
> 
> I know.  (Haven't looked at it since october, I think there was some
> kind of hammer I could hit it with to make it stop...)

It's on my hit list for this project.

> > True.  On the other hand, one of the goals of this project of mine
> > is to provide a government testing lab with something for them to
> > audit, including the development system that we use to build it
> > all, so that the lab can build it to.  The less they have to deal
> > with, the better we will be.  So at a later stage I'll very
> > carefully pull out as much stuff as I can to pare it down to the
> > bare minimum.  Simple minimisations are good enough for this early
> > in the project.  Get it to work first, then optimise away more crap
> > later.
> 
> I hope the orthogonal layers of the build system are reasonable to
> audit separately. :)

The theory I'm going with is - it's mostly well known open source
packages, audit labs probably only really have to look at my patches
and my code.


> >> yacc/bison is something mathematicians like and which I personally
> >> find conceptually unpleasant.
> > 
> > There might be something using bison that is important to me later.
> > I'll know for sure later.
> 
> You can always add more packages later.

Bison and flex not needed after all.  B-)

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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