I am sorry to say this, but it would be better if LFS goes on without
me. The reasons are:
1) I am a troll, because I actually don't use LFS as my primary desktop
since 2005. All LiveCD development on my computer was done from Debian.
Yet I found LFS (actually, an extracted copy of the LiveCD) a very
useful testing platform when I experimented with Xgl and Compiz.
My desktop is XFCE. Also, I _don't_ use new things like Udev, HAL and
UTF-8, due to their immaturity. E.g., Udev adds 30 seconds to the
startup time waiting for something, and I could not debug this: removing
files with rules one-by-one decreased the time in equal steps with no
clear offender. So, I removed Udev. HAL was simply never installed
because XFCE doesn't use it. All HAL testing for BLFS was done with
ivman on LFS. UTF-8 support is simply too buggy, although there is some
progress in some areas.
2) I have never built post-6.2 SVN version of LFS due to lack of time.
And the family objects to the computer noise, so long builds are not an
option. Software suspend does help, and support for it would be
certainly a good addition for BLFS. See the implementation in the LiveCD
repository.
3) I have no cheap broadband Internet access. The family says that
unlimited tariff plans for home are prohibitively expensive, but even
bringing all LiveCD packages up to date would consume more on
pay-for-each-megabyte plans. And there is no possibility to do these
updates from work. Due to excessive bandwidth usage, I already got a
"last" warning in the USU (and I have to quit that job for other reasons
anyway). My old room in the Institute for Metal Physics is still not
repaired (even worse, that room is no longer mine, and there is no and
will not be a computer in the new room until I buy it from my own money,
and I am not going to do that). Thus, my knowledge of BLFS packages is
limited to old versions.
Before anyone offers ssh access: no, I won't accept this, because I hate
to release untested CDs. Money donations won't be accepted either,
because they are likely to be simply wasted.
4) After the two weeks working from 11am to 9pm in the classroom on the
new image (and coming back yesterday to fix damage resulting from
Microsoft's KB920958 "patch"), I completely lost track of current
Linux-related events. Additionally, there is some backlog of
physics-related e-mail to go through.
So, I decided that I should not give any advice to the LFS project at
all rather than questionable advice based on Debian and obsolete versions.
This also means that LFS should drop (too kludgy and half-working) UTF-8
support. This decision is also backed by the fact that some BLFS editors
repeatedly, but certainly not deliberately, misinterpreted my writings.
Beware, however, that there are applications (e.g. shadow and
nautilus-cd-burner) that expect RedHat-like UTF-8 setup (shadow is
already fixed in the book, nautilus-cd-burner is unfixable).
Also, this means that a new maintainer is needed for the LiveCD. Ignore
the trunk, it doesn't have bugfixes present n the latest 6.2-3 CD, and
has no package updates. Since the CD inner workings became too complex
for other people to understand (binary init, device-mapper "snapshot"
target and so on), I won't mind if a fresh start is done.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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