Automated BLFS using package management
 

You can spend hours with BLFS manually loading package after package and it can get a bit tedious.

It's worse if you use the pkguser management system because you get permission denied when trying to install into directories to which you don't have write access. Worse still, there are packages like cups, attr and acl which try to create /usr/bin and /usr/share/man and other such basic directories - and of course package-users can't do this so you have to vim the Makefile and remove the offending lines. Enough to put you off using package management?

Help is at hand. If you have installed LFS using my LFS-BuildScripts, then you can go on and use my BLFS-BuildScripts, available at www.github.com/JohnBurrell. It is very easy.

You run blfsa from your host while chrooted into LFS from another screen. blfsa has a config file in which you choose a section from
the book - security, libraries, programming etc. This will create a section script in $LFS and you simply run it from the chroot environment.

Of course you have the problem of dependencies so I've included a file called pkgorder.sh which is a suggested order to run the scripts so you fulfill the dependencies as quickly as possible.

Read the README on the github site to get a feeling for the range of options available. And because blfsa is a script you have the option to change it, improve it and make it do exactly want you want, not what I want.

There are section files in the tarball blfsfiles.tar.xz which define the package names and package dependencies. So this allows you to change the package name used to install a package. You can't really have a pkguser called telepathy-mission-control so you have to shorten it. I've set up a name but you can choose your own by editing the <SECTION>-files file.

Have a look at blfsa. It's long but pretty straightforward and, hopefully, easy to change.

Give it a go and leave some feedback here.

jb.