On 20/11/2007, Daniel Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Apologies for butting in the (temporal) middle of the conversation but this post was the one that allowed me to crystalise my thoughts on the issue, and here there are for whatever they are worth. I can't see that the LFS/BLF wiki is the place to add such stuff. If someone builds an LFS+BLFS system and then adds stuff to it outside of BLFS (and let's assume they actually build all of LFS) then any commands they use to build the extra stuff will be relevant to only their "installation" (using that word to avoid confusion with "distribution" which has too many connotations for me) which probably wont contain all of BLFS. But what about if they go through the LFS+BLFS build but make some changes to the book instructions,to say, allow for a package management system. Now when they add the extra-to-LFS-BLFS programs, the commands they ran to install stuff will probably change all over again to reflect the package management system. It strikes me that what someone really wants to see, when looking at how someone else installed a program extaernal to LFS/BLFS into an LFS+BLFS environment is what the original installer ALSO had to do DIFFERENTLY to the vanilla LFS+BLFS commands in order to achieve their goal that goal being the external program. What I therefore think the LFS/BLFS community needs is more folk actually documenting what they did by putting up their equivalent of the LFS/BLFS book to describe what they did to get to where they are(were?). This, for me, needs to be encouraged within the LFS/BLFS community. Taking the HTML of the official books and coddling it is not that hard, though it would be nice if there were a couple of extra environments especially for displaying USER additions (I guess this is akin to the "template for the Wiki" notion that is doing the rounds in this thread). The indexing of the internet is now good enough that if you wanted to find an individual's "LFS/BLFS book" containing the external packages you were looking for, you'ld find them without needing to start with the official LFS/BLFS wiki, though that's not to say pointers could nto be placed there Similarly, folk who only want parts of the BLFS book's packages should be encouraged to show exactly what they needed to do, and what they were able to leave out so that folk who come along after benefit from their experience. It strikes me that the LFS/BLFS wiki could end up becoming snowed under with listinsg of individual quirks as opposed to being a "document" that moves towards a "consensus on experience or fact". The folk who produce the LFS/BLFS spend a lot of time making sure that ALL the packages they list will compile if the instructions therein are followed, however there must be a whole load of other LFS/BLFS installtions working perfectly that didn't quite follow the official books to the letter but which may have great relevance for some users. If these individual quirks were, instead, "somewhere out there on the internet" in an LFS/BLFS form that made the differences, between them and the vanilla books, obvious then I believe that would be a gain for the LFS/BLFS community as a whole. Perhaps what might be needed is a BLFS chapter that explains to the user how to go about creating, and placing where it can be seen, a ULFS or ILFS ( User LFS Individual LFS) book ? Hoping this adds something to the discussion, Kevin -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
