Dan Nicholson wrote: > On Dec 6, 2007 6:47 AM, Randy McMurchy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> As I answered before, "I suppose". It just seems weird to redundantly >> give information out because we feel that folks won't read the book, >> so the information needs to be repeated over and over. However, in >> retrospect since so many have chimed in, it does indeed seem to be >> a popular idea, that really doesn't hurt a thing. > > Just to complete the thought, you are absolutely correct that people > should read the whole book and not be surprised when things break > because they skimmed it. But I think this is a spot where we can throw > newbies a bone. There are pointers throughout the book back to the > "Toolchain Technical Notes" for a similar reason. > > -- > Dan
The difference is that the Toolchain Technical Notes are not absolutely needed to build an LFS system. That page helps explain details that would allow you to learn more about the process, but you don't actually *need* to know this in order to successfully build a system. This tends to be info that newbies are not necessarily expected to know so it's fine to toss in pointers to that page from other places, and at the same time it's no big deal if you skip over those pointers (or put them off until later) because you don't really need to know all of that to have a functioning system. The instructions on page 5.1 on the other hand are absolutely required to have any hope of successfully building a system (if you don't know that you are expected to start from the source dir you'll be completely lost, and if you don't rm the source and build dirs after each installation you'll find that gcc is broken in chroot), so if *anything* what might need to be done is strengthen the wording of what's already there and make it clearer about how vitally important those instructions are (personally I think it's pretty clear already, but since many users *still* have trouble with it...). For starters, I've actually felt for some time (just not important enough to me to bother mentioning it, but since we are now discussing the issue I may as well...) that the "unpack as lfs user" is, at best, redundant...after all you are told to be the lfs user a couple pages earlier in the book, and you clearly don't unpack as the lfs user in chapter 6 (I think this should be pretty obvious, but I have seen at least one user asking whether they should also unpack as the lfs user in chapter 6). Additionally, specifying that unpacking be done as the lfs user might imply that unpacking is the *only* thing to be done as the lfs user...granted, I don't recall actually seeing any users who've ever thought that, but I just like to look at every possibility and remove any potential traces of ambiguity... Similarly, the last part about the build instruction assuming the bash shell...this also seems redundant, since the lfs user environment is created with bash as its default shell. If that sentence exists at all, it would probably be more appropriate on the page that describes the creation of the lfs user env. I'm also of the opinion that placing a pointer just in the Binutils installation page would cause some users to think that it applies just to Binutils, so it would be better to just make sure that the instructions concerning unpacking and removing sources are visible and clear that they apply to every package. Well, there is more I'd like to say but I need to be off to my college classes...I'm sure some here might be surprised at my comments here considering the number of times in the past that I've said that the instructions are fine, but there almost always room for improvement... -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
