On 07/06/2011 05:42 PM, Ken Moffat wrote: > On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 07:56:55AM -0500, Rob Landley wrote: >> >> I've used BLFS to build basic X11 support, and I've used it to build a >> few servers. I cherry picked because building the whole thing is >> ridiculous. >> >> Possibly it's time to split the thing into smaller chunks? The layers I >> see are (roughly): >> >> 1) Infrastructure (chapters 3, 5-8, 10-12). >> 2) Networking (chapters 4, 13-22) >> 3) Multimedia (chapters 9, 23-25, 31-44) >> >> And then separate appendices on KDE and Gnome and XFCE and such. >> > With respect, I don't think it was *ever* intended that people > should try to build the whole book, or indeed the whole of many of > the chapters
You're saying that users don't use the whole thing. I'm saying that maintainers can't keep track of the whole thing. It has apparently reached the point where it does not scale, as evidenced by the inability to get a release out in a reasonable amount of time. "Beyond" is not a well-defined (I.E. well-constrained) topic. It potentially includes "everything that isn't in the base LFS", which is over 40,000 packages in Debian. There are specific areas of interest that _are_ reasonably well constrained, the most obvious of which is basic X11, and chopping that out into its own thing is possibly the least controversial move. But standard network servers could be another (ssh, dhcp, web, mail, dns, file and print) although it opens the door to PHP and NFSv4 and all sorts of dubious fuzzy edges you can glue on to those servers. But if "standard network servers" isn't necessarily well-constrained, "beyond linux from scratch" on which that's just one tip of the iceberg definitely isn't. Yes, you'll wind up with X depending on Y: but that's already the case. The whole of BLFS depends on a base LFS version being installed first, so having an "infrastructure" pack as listed above as a second such dependency is not a fundamental change. "Here is a contained set of steps to get your system from point A to point B". Installing something like KDE would depend on (at least) LFS, the BLFS infrastructure pack, and the BLFS X11 stuff, before you could tackle KDE itself. Right now it's in two lumps (LFS itself, then working out your own subset of BLFS necessary to get KDE to work). A more modular approach means less sifting hundreds of packages to figure out which ones you might have missed: instead you need to look at ~4 main conceptual lumps, which you can trim as you go along. Rob -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
