[plug] Recompilation fo the whole box and fluffy dice...

[John Summerfield]

> John Summerfield wrote:
> 
> > I've not tried to recompile a whole distribution, but I have tried to 
> > rebuild a lot of rpms. Many are broken; I suspect Red Hat builds 
> > everything as root, which I do not wish to do.
> 
> There is a package the Debian developers came up with called "fakeroot"
> which LD_PRELOAD's a library that fakes certain syscalls (chown, chmod,
> mknod, stat etc) to make it unneccessary to be root to build packages.

I have fudged it by putting chowm in my private bin directory and putting 
that at the head of $PATH. Then the files end up in the rpm with MY 
ownership.

Also, one rpm I built makes a device! (one of the kernel rpms, I think 
with ibcs in it).

Before you start:
1a	Be sure to have the target's kernel source in place.
In this context, compiling includes installing into the target tree. As 
fas as possible, you use binaries, libaries etc from this tree at all 
times. Clearly, you can't do this until you have a compiler and libc in 
place.

I have been thinking about it. Conclusions:
1	You'd have to be daft OR be making the official PLUG distro.
2	I'm pretty sure you can coax egcs/gcc to run from a non-standard 
location, and to use libc from a non-standard location. If you want to do 
it, read up on this;-)
3	You need to use the right compiler. Compile it first.
4	You gotta use the right glibc too. Compile it next.
5	Prudence thinks you should recompile the compiler now you have the right 
glibc. This time you should be compiling the compielr with itself and 
using the target's glibc.
6	Identify all the other libraries you will need. XFree will probably 
build about here, but KDE won't. Compile them.
6a	About this time you should be able to compile perl, bison etc but otoh 
some things require slang;-)
7	Compile tools you need to build with. ;-) Some of these might have been 
needed for the libraries (yacc/flex comes to mind). Fooled ya!

Once you have the libraries and tools built, everything else should go 
just fine. And you've probably wasted a few weeks.

For my personal use, perl, gcc/egcs, glibc, nfsd and (possibly) the kernel 
are all that could be worth compiling.

-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.