Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tom

[Thomas Flavel <thomasfl@cogs.susx.ac.uk>]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 12:18:48PM +0100, Achim Gottinger wrote:
> Thomas Flavel wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 07:29:01PM -0600, Bryce Porter wrote:
> > >
> > > Tom:
> > > "I'm just thinking along the lines of a minimum binary system where
> > > absolutley needed, and compiling specifically everywhere else? I realise this would
> > > be slow to install on slower systems, but, since we're all power users... ;)
> > >
> > > Seriously though, I do think this would be a nice feature, unless there's
> > > some practicality reason I'm missing."
> > > -------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > I think this is a great idea. I heard of a GNU/Linux distrobution that
> > > when installed compiled all selected packages from source, making it the
> > > most optimized you could get for your specific machine. I think it was
> > > called Rock Linux or something.
> >
> > Not heard of it, but a quick search on google reveals the predicatable url:
> > http://www.rocklinux.org, #rocklinux on irc.openprojects.net.
> >
> > Looks to be faily mature (at least they're past 1.0 ;), supports ppc and alpha
> > as well as x86.
> 
> Please send me you ppc, alpha, i64, mips, sparc machines and I will do the ports. :-)

I have access to SH3, Arm, possibly Sparc (less possibly ultrasparc :) and ppc, all of
which I would like to have running gentoo :)

> 
> > From what I can see it has a binary cd version, with the option
> > to compile from source (the same thing I was talking about, if I understand them
> > correctly). It describes it's package management as closer to FreeBSD than debian.
> > It looks to be quite similar to gentoo to me, although not quite as advanced.
> 
> I took a look at the site and think that we need something similar to cfengine
> sometimes.

That looks like a great idea; I was wondering about something similar for configuring
applications; i.e. some way to save a "theme" for the applications I use (e.g. colours
for lynx matching the colours for man pages etc if you see what I mean)

> 
> I thougth about a minimum build system too, while I had to go back to i486 from i686.
> There is another project linux-from-scratch (www.lfs.org i think) that creates a
> statically linked set
> of packages required for build first and then builds the rest with that bin's. Such a
> set would require
> about 50MB and it is not difficult to make a few modified packages for that.
> This build-system could be placed on a gentoo-source cd together with a snapshot of the
> port-tree.
> Then you whould be able to boot with the source-cd and install a build.tbz2 instead of a
> sys.tbz2.
> Then you can chroot to that system and build everything from sources.
> Additionally this offers the possibility to build gentoo from within another
> linux-distro.
> 
> How do you guys think about that?

Sounds excellent to me :)

- Tom