Hello. Recently the lfs-dev mailing list seems to have decided to flip from xml to php, and to add rpm spec files for all packages so that a package manager can optionally be dropped in. Boot and Udev scripts have also been integrated into the book.
I may have mentioned it before... I hate xml. It's nice to look at the html, it stores information well, but despite the generous help and maintenance from Manuel, I hate maintaining an xml book and I seriously doubt I will like php any better. I want to bring us back to 1969, with a plain text book. In a single tarball have the book, boot scripts, maybe patches too, separated by directories instead of links. Pages for packages can be written with #comments so they can be run as shell scripts to install packages. Each package has a directory, with it's patches (if any), grsecurity policy for the programs, and file lists for tripwire (and/or package manager). So the Inetutils package could have a chap6 directory like: chap6/inetutils chap6/inetutils/chap6-inetutils.txt (shell script) chap6/inetutils/inetutils-1.5-fixes-2.patch chap6/inetutils/ftp.grsec_policy chap6/inetutils/ping.grsec_policy chap6/inetutils/talk.grsec_policy chap6/inetutils/telnet.grsec_policy chap6/inetutils/tftp.grsec_policy chap6/inetutils/inetutils.docfiles_list chap6/inetutils/inetutils.programs_list chap6/inetutils/inetutils.libraries_list Or some variation of this. This is the most robust approach I see. It has what everyone needs, maybe not in the way they want it but in a way that's perfectly usable. A book like this would make me much much happier. It's easy to maintain, and practical. It's not very easy to read from an html browser, but maybe a simple index.html page could be done to keep things browsable, and easy on svn if a new package is added or if packages are moved around. The way I have been editing xml, with Vim, is extremely prone to errors. The pages are not usable, easily, as scripts. And adding more stuff like file lists will just make things worse. Xml is perfectly capable of handling all of this, but it's overkill and I'm more happy as a system developer than a book developer (I do not want to learn xml). I know a lot of people will not like a flip to plain text, and to be honest that doesn't bother me one bit. If anyone has a suggestion that doesn't involve me or other editors taking a six month course in web programing then I would like to hear it. This idea is harder on book readers and users, and easier on editors, which is less efficient, but I think it's a fair compromise if extra hours are spent on systems development. I want to thank Manuel very very much for converting the original plain text book to xml/html, and for doing ongoing maintenance and changes, but I want to go back like it was originally. This has been bugging me for a long time. I'm curious to hear opinions about this. My mind is open. robert -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/hlfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
