dist evals[1]

[Rod Roark]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, plug@arcticmail.com wrote:
> If you wanted to dig in and learn a LOT about
> the guts of a Linux system and all it entails,
> something like linuxfromscratch would be super.
> Kinda like building your own PC clone from
> scratch--you learn what to do, and what not
> to do.
> 
> My question is, with 4,000+ packages available
> for (Linux|*BSD), and (tens|hundreds|thousands)
> of (employees|volunteers) tracking the latest
> version of each package and building a new
> (.deb|.rpm) every (hour|day|week), exactly how
> maintainable is a linuxfromscratch system?

I guess this is a question of automation.  My project LFSMake
(http://lfsmake.org/) is a start on that.  There's also a very (perhaps
too) ambitious automation project getting started via one of the mailing
lists at linuxfromscratch.org.

With LFSMake what you generally do for a new package release is change
the version number in the makefile (or get an updated makefile) and then
run the download and build commands again.  How well that works will
depend on how much the volunteers can manage to stay on top of things.

On the other hand, if you have a working system it's hardly necessary
to do upgrades every day.  Also there's nothing to stop you from
installing your favorite package management system.

-- Rod
   http://www.sunsetsystems.com/