Whatever reasons a person might pick a distro usually is one of personal preference and of what particular use they are specifically aiming for. I do, and I wouldn't be surprised if others did consider lfs/blfs a distro in its own right, and probably are not wrong with that consideration. Every distro has the mark of the people who create it and maintain it. The point is that having a managed or packaged version of LFS would then become a distro of its own beyond what lfs/blfs already is. Does it mean that it is a bad idea of any sorts, not really, it is how a lot of distros have came into existence as it is, one basing its self off of another because the other wasn't fully going in the general direction that a few people thought would be best. Anyrate, I consider lfs/blfs to be a distro of itself as it is, even though the goals may not have initially been a long those lines, I know that Myself included others use it as a full distro to satisfy several purposes of each individual who does use it as one. However with that being said, and the way that the internet has been moving as a whole lately it seems, it would be nice to have the wiki in way that programs outside of what was included in BLFS could be added, and a common format for entries onto the wiki. It would be really nice to be able to go to the wiki and not have to decipher the different entries and the way those entries were put in. As for a package management system for lfs/blfs, it would be nice to have one on one side, but then again part of the reason I don't use most other distros is because of their package management systems, they are lacking in many areas at least to me. Having a tool that can build a program and install it based on some config files and a couple of tar files, would be a better route to me at least, because making a base template and building off of that probably wouldn't be bad, and by the sounds of it, others have written various degrees of scripts to perform exactly that so having one that could be build for lfs/blfs may not be a bad idea. But there again it could be considered a push to making lfs/blfs more of a distro of its own...
As Bruce put it, about the small size, I have lfs running on a server here, pIII 900mhz 256mb of ram and a 40gb hard drive and not using X or any gui system and it boots very quickly and has been very stable while being built even though a bit slow during some of the compiles, nothing too bad. And not using much disk space at all, course that was the goal, to have a light Install, only install the programs needed to be run partially for security partially because of the system specs. I knew that there was no way using any other distro that I would have been able to achieve exactly what I was after in terms of configuration and abilities while running. Course I still need to finish configuring some stuff, and finish building the scripts for it. Would it not be useful if I am going to trouble building stuff outside of BLFS to have a wiki where I can post what I have done to get it to work on my lfs system, including the init scripts that I have been writing and such? Daniel -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bruce Dubbs Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 1:15 PM To: BLFS Development List Subject: Re: Pipe Dreams Alan Lord wrote: > There have been other threads similar to this and I wonder if there is > something not quite right about the whole discussion... > > It seems to me that there are many individuals who have learned and > loved the whole LFS/BLFS experience (I count myself in this group BTW). > I have found, and it seems so have others, that there comes a point when > it becomes too hard (or time consuming) to continue living with the pure > LFS/BLFS distro for day-to-day tasks. That's why I use Ubuntu on my > desktop. > > Perhaps - and this is an idea for discussion and a good "Pipe Dream" - > that there should be another member of the *LFS family... Perhaps MLFS > where the M stood for Managed, or PLFS for Packaged LFS. And let's get > the community to somehow use and develop the fantastic work done in the > LFS and BLFS books and create a version that is basically LFS and *your* > BLFS with some kind of package management control. > > Is this a stupid idea? Is this Gentoo? It's either Gentoo or Slackware. I use LFS for my main system and have for years. The main thing is that just about every package can be updated in place with the possible exception of glibc. One reason I put the section about installing kde and qt in /opt into BLFS is to allow building in place with the option of backing up if it is needed. For a useful system, you don't always have to update to the latest and greatest. I still have production servers running LFS basically unchanged from December 2003. The kernel is 2.4.5. glibc is 2.3.2. There is no need to update. # du -sh /bin /dev /etc /lib /opt /root /sbin /usr /var 3.1M /bin 44K /dev 2.9M /etc 3.6M /lib 8.7M /opt 32K /root 3.0M /sbin 362M /usr 385M /var No X, no bloat. Works. Try getting Ubuntu or RedHat or SUsE down to that size. -- Bruce P.S. The system above also boots to the command prompt in about 15 seconds, not that booting is required often. The uptime right now is 245 days. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
