Hi all, I would sure like to see a new version of BLFS released. I will be very busy (just for the record, I have gone back to school for a new degree and it consumes much of my time), but I will commit to a couple of hours a day.
We are behind in several areas. Wayne, Ken, and DJ have kept the project alive and I am grateful to them for this. Here's my take on the state of BLFS. I am encouraging everyone to contribute to this discussion because I have been out of the loop for so long. Section 4: Security Seems to be close to up-to-date, except for OpenSSL which would be nice to get to 1.0.0 for a release. Ken has been doing extensive testing, as I will as well. Not sure about the GnuPG stack, and I know the Kerberos packages are behind. I have been subscribed to the Heimdal dev list for years, to I am at least aware of where it stands. I can test it easily. MIT I typically trust using the most current version after a test installation. Stunnel needs to be updated. Section 4 is important as they are our *security* packages, which need to be fairly current. Sections 5-7: Vim probably should be updated to 7.3 and match LFS (dev and stable). The Shells, Filesystems, and Editors should be looked at. Sections 8-11: Seems to be more or less up-to-date. We are probably stuck with outdated versions of the GLib/GTK+/ATK/Pango stack if we stay with GNOME-2.30.2. Not sure if that is a big deal or not. Section 12: Programming Is not very current. It needs some work, but nothing there is difficult. Sections 13-18: This is networking stuff that should be looked at for security issues. There are tickets for many of them. Sections 19-22: Are the servers and they should be looked at for security vulnerabilities and that they build and function properly against fairly recent LFS. Sections 23-25: Are the X stuff and it is probably fairly current. It seems DJ just did a bunch of work updating Xorg, and the other X tools just need to be looked at to see if there are very old versions of anything, but I doubt it as most of them are required for GNOME and Wayne has that fairly current. Sections 26-28: KDE Not even a clue what to do here. The book version is a more than two year old desktop that I don't even know if anyone has been following for security patches. Nobody likes CMake and KDE4.x (well, not really nobody, but there has been no book development towards it), so what to do? Sections 29-30: GNOME We are fairly current, but if 6 months goes by without a BLFS release, it would be considered an old desktop. We are at 2.30.2, 2.32 has already been released and in 6 months 3.0 will have been released. Sections 31-34: These programs and applications are mostly current, some need to be updated (GnuCash?), but overall we are not in bad shape. Ken has done a lot of work here (thanks!). Sections 35-38: Multimedia, audio and video utils and CD/DVD tools. Again, Ken has done quite a bit of work here (thanks again!). K3b probably needs to be updated, and I will cave in and ditch XMMS and the entire suite of GTK+-1 tools. The rest of the book is fairly current with a few exceptions. I will handle the update from TeTeX to TeX-Live (from source, not a binary installation). Hopefully, those that read through this synopsis of the state of BLFS can give suggestions on what really needs to be done, as I was guessing on much of what is written above. -- Randy rmlscsi: [bogomips 1003.28] [GNU ld version 2.16.1] [gcc (GCC) 4.0.3] [GNU C Library stable release version 2.3.6] [Linux 2.6.14.3 i686] 08:09:01 up 2 days, 14:03, 1 user, load average: 0.75, 0.33, 0.21 -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
