For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code.
What was your experience like? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Do you run it as a daily driver or did you just do it for fun?
I did it, learned a lot. But it’s not really a system that can be maintained very easily. You don’t even have a package manager. :)
Back when I did LFS I dealt with this by giving each package an /opt prefix, symlinking their respective bin/, sbin/, lib/, man/ and so on dirs under a common place, and adding those places to the relevant system integrations (PATH, /etc/ld.so.conf etc.)
I put together a bash script that could manage the sumlinks and pack/unpack tarballs, and also wrote metadata file and a configure/make “recipe” to each package dir. It worked surprisingly well.
A handful of packages turned out to be hardcoding system paths so they couldn’t be prefixed into /opt (without patching) but most things could.
You were on your way to reinventing Gentoo
Do you even have binary packages?
There’s no level of package management, binary or source. There’s no practical way to uninstall or upgrade. It’s a toy for learning about Linux, which is great, but don’t expect it to have anything else.
Edit: I seem to remember some third party package managers, but then you’re going beyond the base level documentation. And at a certain point, then you might as well just use a distro. If you want to have a very minimal package manager so you can learn about package managers, sure, it’s a learning tool.
If you build a package manager and packages, then you’ll have package manager and packages. Btdt, on how many operating systems would actually be an interesting question.