Some time ago I switched from LFS to CLFS and started making use of Matthias S. Benkmann's "Package Users" scheme (with a few modifications) for my personal laptop.
The gist of the "Package Users" scheme is quite simple, instead of installing packages as root, create a separate user for each package. One obvious upside is that it is very, very easy to see what file came from what package. Another is that you find out right away if two packages are trying to write to the same file. Following some instructions from http://cblfs.cross-lfs.org/ I got a full gnome environment going. However, I have never managed to get 3d graphics to go, nor did I get sound to work right. Over time I have been able to upgrade many package in place, but some things aged quickly: for instance, when I saw that there was a new glibc, I began to plan for a start over from scratch. Today, I expect that a "well tuned" (C)LFS system would get a complete rebuild every six months or so. Perhaps it is no co-incidence that my work machine (which I use day in, day out and requires things like working sound) is not LFS -- it's OS X. :P (I'm a traitor to Free Software, I know.) Jostein Chr. Andersen wrote: > I will start to use LFS again, and I will do it for my music studio. > In the studio box, I find myself compiling packages all the time, > struggling with library dependencies and the package manager. For me, > I think that it will actually be easier to use an LFS system in stead That is a *very* interesting observation. I hadn't quite noticed that the music studio was so *typical* of the frustration which drives people to LFS -- but whatever software we're struggling to compile, it's a usage pattern I'd bet almost all LFS geeks have seen. A friend and colleague of mine made an interesting hybrid system for his work. They started with stock binary package management distro (Ubuntu, I think) then any package which wasn't "right" for them via the main system, they installed using a "Package Users" + BLFS approach. This might be a useful starting point for many people, however living in the half-and-half world had its own struggles, too. The allure of the binary package management system is that it keeps everything up to date, but we all run into things which we can't compile or get to play nice with the main system. Before using LFS, I tried using a popular GNU/Linux "from source" distro, but I had many of the same frustrations I had with binary package management systems. Later, with an eye towards automating CLFS, I started looking at how the BSD ports system does things. I don not suggest we use BSD ports, but I think that they do one thing really well: not only are they source oriented, but they allow for the end user to easily add our own patches to the build. In many ways this seems like a reasonable compromise between central management and end user control. I suspect there are many things that we GNU/Linux users could learn by hanging out with some BSD die-hards. Cheers, -Eric http://cross-lfs.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/more_control_and_pkg_man.txt -- Eric Herman, Software Developer Sun MySQL www.mysql.com Mobile: +31 62 071 9662 -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
