With limited resources, sometimes practicality needs to win. Kudos to Bruce for putting aside his (valid) feelings on the subject and doing what is best for the team and community overall.

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its_magic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I disagree.

I will soon be releasing a distro that is free of systemd, wayland, dbus, and other troublesome software. It is built starting from LFS in 2019, and now consists of over 1,500 packages, cross compiling to x86-32/64, powerpc32/64, and others if I had hardware to test. It's built entirely from shell scripts which are clean, organized, and easy to read.

I need help to get the system ready for release in 60-90 days. In particular, I need a fast build system, as my current 12+ year old workstation is too slow. Alpha/beta testers are welcome too. Anyone who wants to help in some way or hear more details, please get in touch:

domain: killthe.net

user: dave

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M95D 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How did you get GTK3/4 to work without dbus?

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its_magic 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I got rid of dbus in GTK3 by patching the code so that the "accessibility bridge" (to ATK) can be disabled. GTK4 is beneath contempt and will not be supported.

The system uses GTK2 wherever possible, or GTK3 when not. I will either port everything to GTK2 later or create some kind of shim library. Help wanted here. Porting back to GTK2 isn't hard, I just don't have time to work on any of that at the moment.

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M95D 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm running Gentoo without dbus and I'm stuck at gtk 3.24.34. I would love to see those patches. Your site appears to be down.

	▲	its_magic 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's just HTTP only (no SSL) and there's nothing there. ... until now! Here's some nice GTK3 patches for you: http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-disabling-atk-b... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-transparent-win... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-wheel-scrolling... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-appearance-tweaks-and... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-disable-mnemonics-del... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-file-chooser-tweaks.p... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-remove-dead-key-under... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-restore-old-context-m... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-set-default-settings.... http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-show-alternating-row-... Note that GTK 3.24.43 is the last version of GTK3. My system is full of patches like this to tweak, improve, and adjust things. The point is to get off the "upgrade" treadmill and focus on making things work right.

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ripdog 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So, devuan?

	▲	its_magic 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, not even close. Totally different projects. This one is for experts only, or those who want to become experts. The type of person who has been toying with the idea of building a LFS system but doesn't really want to go through all the work and headache (and it's a ton, to build a full system.) It also supports cross compiling to other architectures, which LFS does not. This system has many powerful features like built in ccache/distcc support for the build, support for building in QEMU, etc. Eventually it will be fully sandboxed. There is a heavy emphasis on Doing Things Right according to an old school way of thinking. Everything is kept as simple as possible, yet as full featured as is practical. A major goal is to have everything documented and explained, starting with the shell scripts which build the system step by step in an easy to follow manner. No package manager currently, though a simple one is in the works which is integrated into the build scripts. It's not really needed. You just build a complete system with all packages you want installed in a single run, with your own configuration pre-loaded. This gets compressed to a tarball. Then to install, create a partition, extract the tarball, edit a few files, install the bootloader, set passwords, and go.

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adastra22 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How is this best? It defeats the whole point. I’m going to stop recommending LFS to people wanting to learn about this stuff.

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spijdar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Learn about what stuff? Linux? System V UNIX?

I haven't done LFS since my tweens (and I'm almost 30 now), but I remember the sysvinit portion amounted to, past building and installing the init binary, downloading and extracting a bunch of shell scripts into the target directory and following some instructions for creating the right symlinks.

Obviously, you can go and check out the init scripts (or any other individual part of LFS) as closely as you wish, and it is easier to "see" than systemd. But I strongly protest that sysvinit is either "Linux" (in that it constitutes a critical part of "understanding Linux" nor that it's really that understandable.

But setting aside all of that, and even setting aside the practical reasons given (maintenance burden), when the majority of "Linux" in the wild is based on systemd, if one wanted to do "Linux From Scratch" and get an idea of how an OS like Debian or Fedora works, you would want to build and install systemd from source.

	▲	adastra22 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For me, Linux From Scratch is not about compiling linux from scratch, but on building up an entire Linux distro from the ground up, understanding how every piece fits together. Doing it via systemd is like drawing a big black box, writing LINUX on the side, and calling it a day.

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csb6 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"best" meaning the best decision the LFS team can make given their limited, unpaid time and resources. They feel maintaining guides for two parallel init systems is unsustainable even though they would prefer not to have systemd as the only option.