As a little pet project of mine I've got a webpage that has links to the latest version of all the packages given in the latest LFS book (3.1). There's also a list of additional programs at the bottom of the page that could be used to add a bit more functionality to a basic LFS install. The links are based on the packages .lsm (linux software map) file where applicable. Note that the links to GNU based software point to ibilio.org (formerly Metalab), due to the high server load on GNUs ftp services. If I get around to it, a brief description and possibly package dependencies may appear on here as well.

Thoughts and comments are welcome (e.g. would you actually use this, what else would you like to see?).

Matt Burgess

Seems rather nice. I think it would be usefull for keeping packages up to date after a LFS system has been built.
I don't know if it would have helped for my initial install of LFS because I got the complete package from the LFS server. And the only one I installed from the other list is xfree86.
But I guess if you start adding more programs to the other list it could be usefull. It might be kinda hard to keep a general list of that since everyone chooses to install different programs once they've got the base done.

That's a really cool idea. That'll probably save me bunches of time when I'm checking to see if I have the latest version of stuff.

It's a good thing to do, but I feel obliged to point out that there are CVS versions of LFS including daily CVS snapshots. We make sure the CVS versions always include the latest versions of packages (unless we don't recommend using it, like gcc-3.x for now) including it's installation instructions of course. We don't upgrade to new packages the minute they are released but we make sure it's done in a reasonable amount of time (say a day or two or three - usually depends if the release happens on a weekend or not).

Dependencies are in the lfs-book too. They are not complete dependency lists yet (currently only installation deps, runtime and library deps are going to be added very very soon).

About download links; appendix A of any lfs-book contains the official download locations. Take the CVS version and you get the most up-to-date version of those locations (they are double checked at least once a month but usaully I do a weekly sweep of both new packages and new locations).

I must also point out that the current CVS version is a little bit behind but that's because we've had some 'downtime' with LFS (people on vacation, or having busy lifes outside of LFS) but it's picking up now. Almost back to normal.

And about descriptions; descriptions of what's inside packages (mostly executably programs from that package) is also in the lfs-book. It could be more extensive and it will be (it's on the bug list to take care before lfs-4.0 is released).

PS: don't take this as my dissing your efforts. I just wanted to point out that most of it is already provided or is going to very shortly (within a few weeks) so you could instead focus on submitting that stuff to the lfs-dev list so it can go in the book even sooner. Saves you a lot of time of maintaining those things, since we're doing that already on a full-time basis.

OK Gerard, admittedly I never look at the CVS versions of anything (including LFS-Book) - I prefer to wait until production ready code (or text) is out there. However I will certainly start looking at the newest LFS-Book, and see if there's anything that I could do to help out. I dind't realise I was duplicating effort here - and I don't want to tread on anyones toes if they're already comfortable revising the package lists. At the moment I feel I could provide version numbers, and that's about it. Following a bad experience of "rm -f" while in / as root I kinda trashed my Linux (and Windows) setup and have not been allowed to touch Linux since (my girlfriend is in her final year at uni, and needs a stable computer to do all her dissertations, etc). So until I get Linux back up and running (hopefully around July) I doubt I could update installation and dependency information.

Matt

PS: Why is GCC v3.x.x not supported by seemingly anyone including the LFS project. I know the original 3.0.0 release had major problems with some OO features - but I thought these had been fixed since.

The biggest reason is that up to a few days ago, Glibc couldn't be compiled with GCC-3.x. That's kind of an important package.

Also, there are tons of packages out there that simply can't compile with gcc-3.x This isn't a gcc-3 problem but a coding problme with those packages (they rely on bugs in gcc-2.95.x and other stuff). But we are relying on those packages for day-to-day stuff so until they have fixed their code, we're stuck with gcc-2.95.3

You could install both compilers and try to use gcc-3 whenever possible and fall back to gcc-2.95.3 when the 3.0.3 doesn't work well. It's a hassle to setup properly so we'll just wait a while longer until packages are fixing themselves.

And there was I thinking that coding to exploit bug-ridden platforms was limited to web-development