Re: Why Linux, Why Debian
At 10:10 13/02/2004, you wrote:
>> I wanted to be instantly set up to hack the kernel. BSD's required me
>> to use an installer on nfsroot configs, which was painful and slow,
>> plus it was the wrong kernel as I had in mind hacking on Linux. During
>> potato, I could just untar base2_2.tgz, nuke unconfigured.sh, tftpboot,
>> and it ran.
>> Nowadays I use gentoo for that, since the current Debian tarred root
>> images are unusable for such.
On Sun, Feb 15, 2004 at 10:19:40PM +0100, Jos? Luis Tall?n wrote:
> Hmmm.... debootstrap or even crosshurd ( as pointed by excellent Robert
> Millan ) will do fine.
> I have done it quite a lot of times lately to create unstable chroot in
> which i could hack freely and never had problems.
> mount --bind does help quite a bit, too !
Hmm. Compile userspace from scratch, in a time-constrained scenario, on
underpowered and overloaded hosts, using cross-compilers that don't
actually work (discovered to miscompile the kernel).
That's rather uninteresting and unattractive, particularly when the
cross-toolchains are in highly questionable states in addition to being
rather far from instant on much besides supercomputers (and the build
system is not likely to be very parallelized anyway). I've already
verified cross-toolchains nonfunctional on at least one of the targets
and am in the midst of attempting to narrow down what's exploding so I
can send out coherent gcc bug reports. There are also some rather
irritating nasties since gcc screws up the paths to its helper programs.
So I'm far from impressed with the prospect of debootstrap. It's far,
far slower and worse than having to touch the installers that
universally choke on nfsroots, and even if it looked like it'd be
feasible to get working binaries out of, it would take so long I'd miss
the deadline for returning DOA hardware unless I started in advance of
ordering it, which is also time-constrained. It's so deep into non-
starter territory it didn't even qualify as a plausible course of action.
-- wli
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