On Wednesday 02 June 2010 20:05:36 Paul Rogers wrote: > > But one *can* bellow, "Where am I?" And of course, one should then > > expect the obligatory, "Yer in a boat in the midst of the sea, ya > > dang fool!" > > But let's not AT ALL slight the purpose of LFS, to teach us how to build > a functional Linux/GNU system. I'm sure we all agree, it DOES do that. > And if that leads some of us to scoff at the idea of dragons, it has, in > fact, done the job. I would say that when we instigate workarounds, we > are proving the purpose of LFS. More power to LFS!
I forgot to include a smiley. And an attribution. The query and response are nearly straight from one of Marshall Dodge's "Bert and I" recordings: an intrepid adventurer takes off in a balloon in down-east Maine and quickly find himself in a dense fog all day. And all night. The next day when he emerges from the fog, he's above a farmer in his field. He shouts down, "Where am I?" The farmer responds with typically dry down-east humor, "Yer in a balloon, ya dang fool!" An absolutely correct answer, but not very helpful at all. :) One purpose of LFS (mayhap unstated) is to help the user figure out how she got to be lost in the midst of the sea in the first place. She may not know where she is, but she should be able to determine just how she got there. LFS is, in a manner of speaking, navigation by dead reckoning. Everything should work. But sometimes your instruments are slightly out of calibration, and one step leaves you 'elsewhere'. After that, the rest of the journey is flawed. I'm in the middle of upgrading a firewall product to use Linux 2.6.32 and GCC 4.4.x; the product's build system was originally based on LFS. After nine months and much reference to LFS, I'd upgraded many packages and got it running with Linux 2.6.26 and GCC 4.3.2, generally using LFS 6.4 as a guide. But that wasn't new enough to work with the latest Atom-based appliances and mini-ITX boards. So off to upgrade again. This time, the changes were enough to keep me building and rebuilding the toolchain for several weeks until I tracked down the bugs in the Makefiles and shell scripts. Now I'm stuck on getting 2.6.32 to build with openswan 2.6.x. By-and-large, LFS is a great guide. The only real deficiency I've found is in the configure options for perl; it took me a week to dig through that script (and some source code) to find out why the toolchain perl insisted on on needing libgdbm; simply, it was doing exactly what it should: build to include all optional features it finds on the host. That, of course, poisons the toolchain. So, by all means, more power to LFS! -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
