>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Wols Lists
>> Sent: Monday, December 6, 2021 11:02 AM
>> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
>> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] LLVM and friends is not compatible.
>>
>> On 06/12/2021 17:51, Laurence Perkins wrote:
>> > Source Mage is a spinoff of Sourceror and is kind of the opposite of
>> Gentoo.
>>
>> Well, I read the philosophy thing where it said it wasn't comparable with
>> gentoo ...
>> >
>> > Gentoo is a source-based distro for people who want things to mostly just
>> work like with the binary distros, but also want to do customizations and
>> optimizations easily.
>>
>> Unfortunately, I can be a bit gruff and not suffer fools gladly. Having had
>> a run in with the bug-wranglers over an issue that completely screwed up my
>> boot (nothing to do with gentoo, admittedly), but that exposed idiotic
>> decisions / other bugs in genkernel, I think I want to look elsewhere.
>>
>> Let's take a 2x2 truth table - do I have a boot partition, do I have
>> "automount boot" switched on. Three of the four options stomp all over the
>> live boot partition. The fourth fatal errors with "wah wah why won't you let
>> me stomp all over your live boot partition".
>>
>> The REASON I don't want it stomping all over that partition is the last
>> time a distro (SUSE) did it, it completely trashed my boot leading to
>> several hours debugging and messing about in the systemd rescue shell to get
>> it bootable again. If anybody is going to trash my live boot, I'd rather it
>> was me, not an Artificial Stupidity software manager.
>>
>> The wranglers' solution was simply to "use the no-install option" - except
>> that that promptly crashed with "can't find input files". Huh?
>> Changing the OUTPUT destination makes the INPUT files disappear? wtf?
>> >
Genkernel is pretty... special... It's handy if your system is set up the way
it expects. If not, well, then its utility drops off quickly.
From what you're describing, my suggestion would be to simply only use it for
initramfs generation and do the kernel make yourself. That shouldn't "stomp
all over" anything except maybe a previous initramfs for the same kernel.
Or else use dracut, it works decently for initramfs generation as well and lets
you specify output location so you can copy things to /boot manually if you so
desire.
Or, depending on how complex your system actually is, just creating your own
initramfs isn't terribly difficult. Since it seems like you're wanting
explicit control over everything that might be the option that will keep you
happiest in the long-run.
Because initramfs generation is really the only complex part of the process.
The rest is just a wrapper for "make && make install && make modules_install"
with a few extras of marginal utility like archiving your .config files.
>> > Source Mage is a distro for Linux From Scratch folks who are tired of
>> maintaining their own package manager. They don't change*anything* from
>> upstream in their packages, (which makes it really easy to keep "updated" on
>> their end) but the package manager does have a lot of nice features for
>> easily storing whatever patches and configuration changes you choose to make
>> in order to get it running on your system.
>>
>> Well, if I have to get into maintaining emerge to get it to behave
>> sensibly, I might as well try somewhere else and see if it's an improvement.
>> >
>> > If you've always wanted to try LFS but tracking package files and patches
>> and configs and so-forth seemed daunting then it's definitely an awesome set
>> of tools.
>> >
>> > Otherwise it's kind of a lot of work...
>> >
>> Well, given that I've got oodles of space (just added 3TB to my mirror to
>> give myself a 5TB raid-5 /home lvm, along with 1TB root/ lvm, I've got
>> plenty of space to play with distros. And I was shocked - 32GB of
>> DD4 was just over £100, so my new system now has 11TB of hard drive, 32GB
>> of RAM, and a hefty 4-core Ryzen processor :-)
>>
>> And the bits from shop screw-up mean the new raid testbed I'm building will
>> be a reasonably hefty system too - 4x1TB drives for hammering with raid, 3TB
>> backup drive, 16GB ram - just the thing for learning to kernel program :-)
>>
>> And seeing as I won't care about trashing it by mistake, I'll be playing
>> with KVM, and all those other fancy technologies to try and run multiple
>> distros stacked on top of each other :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wol
>>
>>
Source-mage is definitely worth experimenting with if you want to get more into
the nuts-and-bolts of how to create your own distro without necessarily going
full LFS. I haven't used it personally in a long time though since I kind of
need to actually *use* the computer rather than just constantly maintaining it.
:D
LMP
