Ok that sounds exactly like what I am looking for. I am going to follow your
example step-by-step because I will remember it once I see it with my own
eyes. I will take good notes too for easy reproduction down the road. I don't
want a repo here. I don't have the space. I will copy all the debs in the
archives to a folder on the data partitions so I don't have to hit the
Trisquel servers if I decide to revert back.
I am a tinkerer too. I can afford to play with Trisquel on my desktop,
because I've also got Parabola and a freed Gentoo on the desktop, as well as
Trisquel on the netbook (which is perfect for it beyond words. I can't even
imagine anything else on the netbook but Trisquel's KDE4 plasma netbook UI. I
tried Gnome 3 and loved it but am totally addicted to opening terminals from
whatever folder I happen to be in).
Even if the desktop does get hosed, I will have the deb archives for a quick
reinstall and will tar up /etc too before diving in. I want to follow the
same recipe for building Gentoo, ie, build gcc, then glibc, then binutils,
install all 3, then rebuild them again in that order, and then rebuild the
rest from the ground up. KDE4 on Trisquel is already light as a feather, but
I am DYING to know if it can get even lighter with a recompile. So this is my
summer project.
I tried this on Parabola. Gcc built perfectly. Glibc errored out. So I
decided to recompile X, Qt4 and all of KDE instead. X built perfectly, but
Qt4 errored out. It's not Parabola's fault. There is a reason gcc-4.6.3 is
the base of Gentoo stable, instead of gcc-4.8.0. Parabola is an Arch fork, so
there ya go.
