Hey all,
After taking an unfortunate 7 month break from linux I'm jumping right back in the deep end. Most of my linux experiance has been on Gentoo, and while I've been more than happy with it I'm starting to get the impression that I'm kind of learning Gentoo and not 'linux' (if that makes sense ) LFS seems like a good choice to really learn whats going on, however, I have a two concerns:

1. Is LFS viable as one's primary system or is it more of a 'learning lab'?

2. Management:
This is a major concern of mine. With Gentoo everything was handled by Portage; I knew what was installed, what depended on it, why it was installed, when it could be upgraded, why it can or can't be uninstalled , etc. How would I handle all the tasks portage took care of for me such as installing/updating/uninstalling packages and their dependencies in LFS?

Hope this made sense to anyone. Thanks in advance!

I just got my LFS system up and running, and it's taken about 2 weeks (that's actually going through the book & installing packages from BLFS). I'm using it alongside Windows. But I guess it depends what you're using it for. I'm using it on a regular desktop computer. I've got X Windows (with fluxbox), Opera and AlSA working. Is that all I want, no. I'm going to put mplayer on as well as a few other tidbits. but if you want to install every new program or just a lot of programs. I probably wouldn't recommend LFS, as package management would be not a lot of fun. I'm sure there are package managers you can use, but as far as I'm concerned I'm only installing sources that are absolutely neccesary for the operation of my computer for the functions I'm performing. It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of days at work without much sleep. I've learned a lot of about what linux is and the applications that I need to perform system functions. I've learned a lot about configuration.

If you decide to go with LFS, I would suggest installing off of the LFS Live CD, as it is the purest environment from which to install.

Goodluck,

You could, in theory, install any package manager you wanted and use it with LFS. You'd need to build all your own packages for it etc.

Well, I post it from LFS. For many free software packages it is one of the easiest system to build them - because most libraries are vanilla, not vendor-patched. Primary OS for more than half a year, and going on. By the way, I don't use udev. I have a replacement. In LFS nothing will be against my will, except my mistakes and unwritten software.

Package management.. First build - I didn't use it. And messed up a bit. Second build - I used make_uninstall, it keeps track of all the steps during make install and can revert them or simply create a package which will do the same. Now I use unionfs. To be exact - patched funionfs, FUSE FS doing union. Sorry, I can't say when next version (with this patches accepted, I hope) will be released. Really simple, but a bit slow...

By the way, build core system by jhalfs, it is not the place you would do many changes, but jhalfs will probably give result from first try..

Well there are many solutions for package management.
I think the easiest is to go with pacman.

Alternatively you can use paco to install binaries of compiled
programs, and move this binaries around easily.

Also, you can try to use unionfs to use a package manager
(remove/install packages on the fly beautifully)

Or you could write your own package manager in
python or ruby (i have a set of ruby scripts to do
exactly that, but its ugly code and far from ready)


Or you could do it like Gobolinux does it, with
installing programs into
/Programs/Program_name/Program_version
(its a beautiful method if you ask me)

Other solutions are to install under
/pkg/name/version

Probably depends what you want.

What I absolutely HATE about package managers are the
artifical splitting up of packages.

I compile ruby from source, and it WORKS.
If i use debian, i have to struggle to find the ruby
packages... thats so annoying compared to the ease
of configure --prefix=/somewhere

...