Hi guys,

I just wanted to share this project of mine that I made awhile back. After compiling -all- the things, I decided on a whim that I wanted to build myself a system that used dpkg, apt, and the Debian repositories to install software.. from the ground up.

I quickly found that there was no real guide to do this, and that most of what had been written regarding this topic was very dated and unhelpful advice, typically about 10 years old.

So I took it as a challenge to figure out a way to make it work, and eventually with quite a few days of "just hacking around" the system, I eventually found a way to get more or less the entire Debian environment rolling along. Of course, it uses the LFS guide as a base guide, so it's not completely standalone.

I decided also that maybe some of you fellow nerds would find this interesting. Not all of you, but at least some of you who aren't insistent that everything should be compiled all of the time. So I made a guide and threw this on github.

Anyway, I'm not claiming it's completely finished or anything (but it -will- give you a bootable Debian system), but for what it's worth, if you ever wanted to do something like this, or needed help installing dpkg, apt, etc.. check out my documentation/project here.

Debian From Scratch

Hi.

This looks good! I am on Debian now, and have no reason to go through the pain of installing LFS+dpkg now, but will keep this in mind the next time I have another mid-life crisis.

One question: With this, I assume you are able to also update the packages as they become available in the Debian repository? One of the things that was a pain in standard LFS was keeping the packages up to date.

Yes, updating works -exactly- as you would expect of a regular Debian system. This project takes the standard LFS build and gives you for all intents and purposes, a completely functional Debian system.

That's one of the reasons for me building this project - I found the constant and relentless compilation of source code and hunting down dependencies a hassle.

Just a few questions:

- Do you provide any script to facilitate the compilation process ?

- I don't see the binutils / gcc_pass 1 and 2

- As your first package is dpkg, it will be link against the /tools lib that's really not good. You should:

1. compile dpkg fully static
2. compile it BEFORE entering your chroot

- No logs to trace back your compilations ?

I took a brief look and don't really understand what you are trying to do.
To me, it seems you built an LFS tools, added dpkg and installed binaries from debian.
How is this from scratch? You could save a lot of time and effort and do a bootstrap?
Or you could boot any linux livecd, add dpkg if it is not debian/ubuntu based and do:
for each of your listed packages.

To have a debian from scratch (my opinion), you would use ch5 aka tools to build the binaries you are using.