Hello, Ken/the whole LFS community: First I wanna say that I really appreciate your effort and the whole LFS project, without which I wouldn't image I could build my own Linux distribution. [1] But, I do wonder, can the burnout you feeled be avoided?
Sometimes I'm indeed surprised by the effort put into compiling a package with system libraries instead of the bundled ones when reading BLFS, will it be the end of world if one does the other way around? I know it certainly isn't for me, since I never compile any package with the `--with-system-*' flag, and I have been happily doing it this way for the last couple years without any problem. But whether it's right or not is really not the point here, many things in the BLFS book are too opinionated, if one is determined enough to build his own Linux distribution, one is probably also opinionated enough. And the worst is that writing those opinions and details and keep them up to date will drain you. I wish BLFS could be more brief, more interesting, and less cumbersome. I know it can since I only wrote 100+ lines of configuration to build an entire Linux distribution [1], I really don't think it's necessary to give detailed compiling instructions for every single package BLFS includes, this repetitive task is the devil, it takes out all the pleasure and makes you hate what you do, and as you put it, takes away one's sanity. Instead of those detailed recipes, one could simply write about what build system this package uses, which part of the README file contains a description of the dependencies, what other files under the source directory are worth reading, what're some interesting history/stories about this package, how does this package connects to other packages, what're some simple demonstrations of the things this package could do. I think it's much more informative and interesting to write this way, and this is creative instead of repetitive. Finally, I don't know how the BLFS community feels about an official package manager, I made a post to the LFS mailing list about the package manager [1] I created to manage my own Linux distribution a couple month ago, it uses the package by difference method and works with any package without exception, I still think it's the perfect package manager for BLFS, even (to my surprise) it got no response. It enables one to easily create a binary package from compilation, remove a package, or restore a removed package from the binary package created, incrementally rebuild a system, transfer compiled packages to another machine. It makes BLFS much easier and it saves much effort. For example, since it has complete knowledge over what files are installed, elf binaries/shared libraries could be automatically stripped, .la files could automatically be removed, man pages could also be automatically be compressed, instead of giving instructions to do these things mannually. BLFS could be much more with it, it could be THE polymorphism Linux distribution of everyone that wants to create his own. I mentioned it again since there's now difficuly in the BLFS development, I want to provide my input and potentially a new and interesting direction for the development process. I still consider [1] as my contribution to the BLFS community, even if it's not recognized or anticipated, and I bet I'm not the only one, so you really shouldn't be sad that there're few contributors, I'm sure there're many people inspired by BLFS and created their own projects, just like I did, they're contributing, just not directly, you should be proud of what you did. [1] https://github.com/057a3dd61f99517a3afea0051a49cb27994f94d/rslinux Sincerely, Yang Bo. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
