Public SourceMage Discussion List

[seth AT swoolley.homeip.net]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 10:36:58PM -0300, Ismael Luceno wrote:
> Andrew Stitt escribi?:
> > As was pointed out by Seth, you do need to explain yourself. I think its a
> > better form of collaboration. Hypothetically if someone really is correct
> > then they should be able to support that with more tangible information.
> > Its certainly makes us no worse off.
> > 
> > Also, we have a certain design philosophy in this distro of minimalism and
> > simplicity. We're not in the business of tailoring things precisely to
> > one idea of correctness. Every user knows whats best for *their*
> > installation. Its my understanding of this philosophy that we (as a
> > distro) aren't going to force anything on them. Put another way, we
> > aren't in the business of preventing people from doing certain things
> > by forcing certain behaviors on them.
> > 
> > This discussion comes up every few months with a different idea of what
> > the "right" basesystem build order is. Yours may very well be correct
> > for your particular application. I suspect you've been involved with LFS
> > and look at it from that perspective. However that order may not be
> > correct or desirable for others in all cases. Everything in basesystem
> > arguably depends on nearly everything else in basesystem. The answer
> > is always the same though. Just cast the first 7 things the way you
> > want, then do your rebuild. (Likewise, I do my own custom steps before
> > a rebuild). There are more elaborate things you could do, such as making
> > a custom spell for your bootstrap components. There might be a sorcery
> > enhancement in here somewhere, if there is, it hasn't been expressed
> > generally enough.
> 
> I explained it better in other e-mail.
> 
> Of course I can do it manually, and I did, but it will be nice to have
> sorcery to do it for me :).
> 
> I know, maybe it's not suitable for 'sorcery rebuild', but could be
> added as another command.
> 
> The only thing that I think should be done in that way is the
> toolchain, because it's desirable to have the system rebuilt with
> the newer version of gcc.

Generally, updates are done before you do a rebuild.  That's why nobody 
asks for this feature.  Somebody might upgrade to the next version of 
stable (which is when toolchains are updated so we can predictably QA 
it), and then rebuild.  People don't update the grimoire and then 
rebuild hoping the combination upgrade/rebuild is going to be good.  Or, 
if they do, they are asking for trouble.

I'm just saying toolchains tend to be sorted out before rebuilds, and 
with our update process, it tends to be a non-issue.

> 
> I'm still not sure about if glibc should be built, as I see, it
> should be sufficient with binutils and gcc, but a friend said that
> some of the gcc characteristics depends on it, so I trust him until
> I get time to check that by myself.

FYI, it's these kinds of statements that makes us constantly ask for 
justification.  We can put specific reasons into our code when we 
implement things and when somebody asks later we can say rtfs.  But we 
never make decisions based on random emails where people say "this is 
best".  You aren't even sure yourself.  I know I wouldn't even be sure 
of the correct order unless I looked at it within the last week and 
researched it.

Seth