So I've been looking at the book XML in more depth, since I'm definitely interested in getting involved in the LFS projects. I've been looking mostly at the CLFS book, since much of my hardware is x64-based. In looking at it, I've found myself wondering if there's an "overall design" sort of document somewhere that talks about best practices, and why things are put together the way they are.
Particularly, as I mentioned, I'm interested in what would be considered to be the best way to "extend" an existing book, in a way that's most compatible with the existing books. For the case I'm after at the moment (the bootable ISO), the vast majority of the steps would be identical; the only differences would be some extra steps in the kernel build, the boot scripts, and an extra step after installing packages. I can think of three ways to do this: 1. Add a new attribute (perhaps "profile.condition=iso"?) to the Makefile, and add the extra steps to the existing XML. This has the greatest impact on the existing book, but also is the easiest to keep the new steps in sync. This might not be easily maintained as a patch. 2. Add a new directory within the book for the new build type, mirror the directory and file structure, and use XInclude/XPointer to include all the identical pieces. This is zero impact to the existing book, but is much harder to keep synchronized. This could probably be maintained as "unpack this tarball into the BOOK directory". 3. Make it a whole new book, starting its life as a copy of an existing one. As the person who's looking to do this, of course, I'd personally prefer #1 - but I also recognize that means that I'm playing in somebody else's sandbox. The advantage here is that I'm more than happy to help with the mainline development, since it would all fully apply to my build as well. For instance, I have succeeded in building CLFS with newer versions of several of the packages - is there somewhere I should forward those changes to? My eventual goal (via jhalfs) is to be able to get pushbutton creation of "appliance" CDs. I've been using a heavily-modified Slax image, but ultimately I need more control over the final product than I can easily get with Slax. So I'd be interested in helping with jhalfs development as well - for instance, distcc support in jhalfs would be a wonderful thing (I've been using it with good success in CLFS builds, albeit with a lot of manual help). So - what are your thoughts on the best way for me to proceed with this? -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
