[mkroot] State of the whatsis.

[Rob Landley]

I haven't posted here much because I wanted to migrate the old mailing list
membership to the new one first, and I finally sat down spent the 45 minutes
cutting and pasting individual email addresses in dreamhost's web interface to
do that. (No I don't have access to the command line tools for this, because
Dreamhost).

I gave an ELC talk about mkroot last year:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9TatW9ino

But I was soooo jetlagged I only I covered maybe half the material I meant to.

I'm thinking is trying to do a series of shorter videos covering portions of
this material, maybe with corresponding text writeups for the people who prever
reading to videos.

(The limiting factor on my work time is generally eyestrain, so stuff with an
audio component where I don't have to focus too clearly on the screen work
pretty well for me as a break from real work, and youtube lets you speed them up
all the way to 2x if you want to, which is fine if the speaker doesn't have a
strong accent. But I'm aware some people have strong opinions the other way.)

Anyway, I'm ready to cut a mkroot release with the 4.14 kernel and toybox 0.76.
I haven't yet because I'm poking at the x32 stuff, but I should probably punt
that to next release.

Anybody want to give feedback about what they want out of the next version? I
haven't hooked up the native toolchains yet or reproduced aboriginal linux's
build control image infrastructure yet, I've got a few things competing for my
attention there:

1) Replace the remaining busybox commands with toybox. (If that includes the
shell and ash, it's a big deal. If the first pass doesn't, much less work.)

2) Reproduce full linux from scratch build with current(ish) LFS, and then maybe
some BLFS stuff too.

3) Extend the toybox test suite to have tests that run as root in a known
environment. (Testing stuff like "top" is kinda crazy however you go about it...)

4) Wire up the distcc infrastructure again (I tried and current distcc has
fallen off a cliff of gratuitous complexity, it's easier to write my own in tobyox).

5) Add a simple strace to toybox. (Static native binaries last time were
dropbear and strace, 90% of the complexity of strace is decoding structures and
such, a quick version that gives you a hex dump of that sort of thing would be a
lot easier. But it's still probably going to use a file produced from the kernel
source code with an evil "sed" invocation since there's no proper syscall list
exported by that, and I need to make sure that's squashed to a scenes a faire
representation like the headers are...)

So, new list, big roadblock removed and I'm trying to be more active here now.
(I should explain more personal work-related context on my patreon. I'm already
trying to catch my blog up because I promised that there...)

Rob