This mail is particularly aimed at people who are using old versions of LFS/BLFS as desktop systems.
Some people here may recall that I like to keep old desktop systems "usable" (definition in a moment), both so that I can look at them to see how things have changed (or sometimes, to rule out a change when debugging a build problem), and to make them available for rescueing my current system if^Wwhen I trash that. My definition of "usable" : recent kernel (something from a series which is still maintained), current openssl, current firefox, all vulnerabilities of which I am aware either addressed, or labelled as "only a DOS, unlikely to harm me" - that latter applies e.g. to the most recent fix that debian has made to sox, which can apparently crash on a specially crafted wav file. When I started using BLFS, there was not very much in it for desktop systems and it was not my sole desktop. When I committed to using it as my main systems, I noted that some distros made releases with varieties of long-term support, and that seemed to me to be a reasonable thing to do : 3 years sounded like a sensible time. What I did not appreciate was how much effort is required, and I now metaphorically take my hat off to people who support old systems. I also did not realise quite how much distros sometimes have to upgrade when avoiding vulnerabilities. A few months ago, I stopped maintaining my recent svn builds from before the last release of the book, they were not providing enough benefit. But I was still trying to maintain my 'release' LFS-7.0+ systems. With firefox, there were some interesting wrinkles (one of them needed various workarounds on x86_64 for its particular version of gcc), and eventually I had to give up 7.0). But I still had hopes of keeping the systems usable for two years plus. So what has prompted me to write this ? The latest xorg-server release [ fixes vulnerabilities, some of which are in all previous versions of X11 ]. Of course, it needs current headers (and presumably current libraries), so for me it is easiest just to rebuild most of Xorg - obviously, fonts do not need to be updated. I'm now nearly done (got two more systems on this slow machine to do), and I've had to drop both my LFS-7.1 and LFS-7.2 systems. The problem was llvm : for me, there is no benefit in trying to either build current Mesa with an older llvm, or in trying to use a slightly older Mesa, but other people might wish to try that if desperate. On my 7.2 system, I got repeated ICEs (internal compiler errors) while trying to build current llvm. That is on my AMD phenom, which has had similar problems from time to time, but this time dropping the caches and using a lower value of '-j' for 'make' did not help. So, I tried leaving my old Mesa in place, but it was too old for current xorg-server. On my 7.1 system, current llvm refuses to configure, gcc is too old. There is a switch to override that, but using it seems like a silly idea. So, my oldest maintained ystem is now LFS/BLFS-7.3. On the bright side, that means a bit less to do next time there are vulnerabilities. Also, I can drop my workarounds in the firefox scripts for missing cairo-tee, old gstreamer, and fixing things up where jpeg-turbo had replaced jpegsrc (I saw no benefit in rebuilding everything which might have been using jpeg, so I just had to fix up a library symlink. The down side, for me, is that my desktops will probably now only last for 12 to 18 months - I do not enjoy "planned obsolescence" in any context. Summary - it is probably easiest to build a new system rather than try to keep a desktop running safely for years. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
