Hi, I do not know who monitors this list, but I'd like to submit some ideas about improving jhalfs, for both (C)LFS and BLFS. My initial idea was to put some time in jhalf-BLFS improvement, but I think others might have ideas about improvements to the (C)LFS part. Actually, I think of one: a few parts are still hard coded and not read from the books (mainly chapter 4). They rarely change, but it would be interesting to retrieve them from the books. I'll try that first, but please feel free to add to that TODO.
Now, the BLFS part offers much more room for improvement: - Pages with no version are not considered by the tool, but may be needed as dependencies (for example CA certificates for p11-kit and gnutls), or to set up the environment (for example "Configuring the JAVA environment" and "Setting the PATH for TeX Live"). I think the <sect1info><date> tag could be used as version for those pages. - There is presently no way to know which bootscript to reinstall when the bootscript tarball is modified. Having a file of installed bootscripts could help (or maybe use the listing of "/etc/init.d"). - There is no way to build perl modules external (not in the book) dependencies. It would be interesting to find a way to do that. The main problem is that the book lacks version information for those dependencies, and I am not sure it is easy to find the latest one. - There is no automatic figure computation (SBUs and size). This would be easy to install. - There should be a way to store build logs, build scripts and possibly the used dependency tree. Presently, they get destroyed when running make in the blfs_root directory. OTOH, indexing those logs is not easy, since very often, a list of packages is given to be built, and they each pull their dependencies, so that the logs (same for the scripts and deps) are all grouped in one unique directory, the naming of which can never be enough to retrieve one particular package information. - there is no DESTDIR install option. Installing in a DESTDIR would allow to reuse the "package management" infrastructure of LFS-jhalfs, giving much more flexibility to book testing (easy addition or removal of packages to test dependencies for example). - the Makefile is not optimal. Normally, there should be no need for ordering targets, only the dependencies should be given, and make would manage to find an order. The initial design was mimic what had been done with LFS (where the book order is important), but I do not think it should be kept. It would be much easier to add a target (for example a package which is not in the book). Well, I am thinking of other things, but this is already a pretty long TODO... Pierre -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/alfs-discuss FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
