DIY Linux

Please see the Project Goals and Guidelines page for an outline of what constitutes a Reference Build.

A HOWTO describing the Reference Build is in the course of being written. You can view HTML of the current progress here (rendered after each commit). The Docbook XML sources are kept in CVS. You can browse the CVS history online here using viewcvs. You can also check out the read-only CVS sources anonymously:

cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.diy-linux.org:/cvs/diy co refbuild

An email for each commit to the CVS repository is sent to a commits mailing list and is archived here. The build commands for each source package are the building blocks of the overall build recipe. These "scriptlets" are extracted from the XML sources using an XSL stylesheet and are very handy for integration into your build scripts. See the sources for details.

Here is a small sample of what has already been achieved as compared to current LFS:

• Robustness fixes. Many changes in the Temptools phase to make it more "bootstrap like". It now builds on a much wider range of hosts. See the Bootstrap Status page for details
• Got rid of the "keep-binutils-build-and-src-dirs-around" kludge
• Got rid of the "keep-tcl-build-dir-around" kludge
• Got rid of all hardwired paths
• Streamlined the Temptools phase Gettext build
• Implemented use of `config.site' to increase efficiency with the build commands
• Corrected the flaw where the Chroot Binutils and GCC link against the wrong Glibc
  
• Corrected the flaw where the Chroot Binutils are not used during the Chroot GCC build
• Achieved a clean split between the Temptools and Chroot phases. No more modifying Temptools files while inside the Chroot
• Glibc is now built against sanitized kernel headers (this is exactly how the pro's do it)
  
• Glibc build is now sensibly optimized (this is exactly how the pro's do it)
  
• The build can rebuild itself reproducibly, proved with a binary comparison technique known as Iterative Comparison Analysis (ICA)