jh-branch

[Jeremy Huntwork]

Hello,

You may have seen me working recently on a branch called 'jh'. I named
it that as a way to show that there are personal changes that have not
yet been community approved. And I needed an easy way to document and
present ideas. 

Here are the major changes:

* Merge x86 and x86_64 commands into one book. Where there are textual
  explanations concerning target triplets, lib64 directories and dynamic
  linkers, I attempted to show what patterns to look for. Much of that,
  in fact, was already in the book. Commands to be executed, however,
  were made to work no matter which arch the host is.

* Upgrade to HJL Binutils-2.17.50.0.18, GCC 4.2.1 and Glibc 2.6.1
  (Since this book is targeted for 7.0, I decided to keep my work based
  on these current versions. The HJL Binutils so far seems to work
  better with these versions of GCC and Glibc.)

* Use --disable-checking on GCC Pass 1. See this ticket:
  http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/ticket/2056

* Drop the Gcc specs patch in favor of a small loop. Because the loop is
  a little larger than most other modification commands, I explained it
  step-by-step afterwards, even though that would be unnecessary for the
  experienced reader. Additional educational value of the loop are two
  commands that are not elsewhere used in the book: 'cp -u' and
  find's '-o' switch.

Missing items:

* Need to fix up the command on the kernel page for installing the
  kernel. Will vary according to arch. Suggestions welcome.

* Need to add a boot loader

Items for future consideration:

* Add --disable-stage1-checking for GCC Pass 1. Speeds up bootstrapping.
  The extra checking done on stage1 seems unnecessary, especially as it
  gets built again in two more stages of pass 1 and then our next two
  compilers are built in a known environment.

* There's been a request to make '/tools' a variable. Incidentally, the
  libc patch to perl could also be swapped for command line alterations.
  Personally, even though there's often more typing, I favor these
  commands over patches. You can see at once what is being altered and
  there's greater opportunity for education.

* For several of the packages in chapter 5 we could cut out the 'make
  install' target in favor of copying single binaries to /tools/bin,
  saving some measure of space. I haven't yet quantified the savings,
  so I don't know if this is worth the trouble, but it's an idea to
  consider. DIY does this for many of its packages already.


The book has been verified to build on both x86_64 with 64-bit
userspace and x86 hosts. As of now I only have logs for the x86 build.
I intend to run builds again on both hosts running all final testsuites
and either farce or ICA.

Here's the rendered book: http://linuxfromscratch.org/~jhuntwork/lfs-JH/
And the x86 logs: http://linuxfromscratch.org/~jhuntwork/x86-logs/

That's it. Sorry for the length of the post.

--
JH