At the risk of being too general for this particular forum, I thought it might be useful to back WAY up and look at general approaches to problems. This is a "thesis at the end essay." Those who are in a hurry should just ignore this. :)
First, one of the things one "gets" after doing an LFS build is how to analyze "circular dependencies." One finds that they are not really circular. Certain parts of certain programs need to be built first. Your target program can then be compiled using just the part one needs. Cultivating that insight is one of the things one learns. Piece by piece, complex interrelationships can be built. This involves going back and recompiling. A good example of this is Lynx. My first build was enough to get me on the net, but it could not handle https. But handling https required a pretty large infrastructure. All the instructions for achieving that are in BLFS, but I needed a working Lynx to even read that. Second, because everyone at this stage of an install has their own goal, it's impossible to provide a "cookbook." For example, My own goal is to build an "image manipulation server." The idea is to be able to upload raw files from my camera at a Starbucks (or whatever) and then ssh into the server to tag, build a database, and export versions of my images to various websites. All the "heavy lifting" is done on the server. Any sports or journalist photographer can appreciate the power of that. It's the "itch I need to scratch." It's why I am here. I give you that "slice of life" because it shows that such things as ssh, exiv2, and ImageMagick are life and death matters. They must be fully featured, totally secure, and eminently functional. The glue code I use these days is Python, but that's not important, the important thing is that I have certain things that are extremely important to me, and this is EXTREMELY personal. But the authors have no way of knowing that. So I appreciate and understand the openendedness of the instructions. Third, that said, the instructions for getting sshlib installed are a bit thin. For example, unless I enable a debug build, for some reason (It's right in the INSTALL file of libssh-0.7.3. "-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug"), configure fails. So I guess it's "by the book" or FU. Irritating, you know? Because not doing a debug build should work. I'm NOT gonna fix a problem with libssh. I got other fish to fry. Also, one MUST have cmake, which has a damn freight train of dependencies. But a lot of great programs use cmake and those libs, so that might be worth doing a bit of LFS style, pedantic, "newbie explanation" on cmake and libssh. Just one guy's opinion, brothers. I did figure it out, and I ain't a damn genius, but... I DID figure out how to get that gorgeous Terminus font installed without having to install all of X11. The key to the biscuit is bdftopc. But one needs only the base xorg libs to install that, not every X11 dependency. (IIRC?) So there's one little option to help users who do not wish to install a WM but really would like a comfy, even "pretty" console. I think that would be a worthy mod to the BLFS instruction set. Here's a title that will get hits: "How to get a virtual console so beautiful, you'll never want X again." If anyone is qualified to make that title be true, you cats are. :)
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