Aiming for 7.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

Gordon Schumacher wrote:
> Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> 
>> Bryan Kadzban wrote:
>>   
>>>> Ticket 2033 -- initramfs.  This way people with crappy software "RAID1
>>>> cards" (e.g. Promise, Highpoint, etc.) that require drivers in Windows,
>>>> can still boot from those cards.  Also, support for MD RAID (*real*
>>>> software RAID ;-) ), LVM, and encrypted rootfs would be nice.
>>>>
>>>> (The mkinitramfs repo linked to from that ticket will already work for
>>>> everything above, except encrypted rootfs.)
>>>     
> 
> Again, this is very, very probably something I will need to do for
> Linux-Live support; I'm not 100% positive yet, but I do know that for
> the sort of application I am after, I personally will need an initramfs;
> I need something that will run on any PC system, which means I can't
> just compile the specific drivers I need for boot into the kernel.  (And
> indeed, that includes fakeraid.)
> 
>> Even it it's poor hardware support, does the frequency of occurrence rise to the 
>> level of needing to be in the LFS book?  As several comments in the ticket 
>> suggest, initramfs would be more appropriate for BLFS, but I'm thinking that 
>> even that is too much and an updated hint or wiki entry would be more appropriate.
> 
> So, here's something to ponder... is it a requirement that the LFS book
> be 100% linear?  That is to say, that the build process is always identical?

Generally, we want to minimize any differences between builds.  When we go to 
64-bit, we'll probably need to cover more than one boot loader though.

> The reason I ask is this: if you're starting from the XML, using
> profiling it's pretty simple to generate different books out of the same
> source.  Perhaps a hybrid approach could be taken to generating the
> HTML, with something like a little JavaScript page at the beginning to
> set options like initramfs or package management, and the necessary
> links and sections could be displayed accordingly?  Failing that,
> perhaps a message to the effect of "If you do not require initramfs
> support, you may skip this section" with a helpful link to do so?
> 
> Just some thoughts, I'm not sure of the best way for such a thing myself.

I'm not saying to not do it.  I'm saying that LFS is the wrong place.  BLFS is 
where the user picks and chooses.  I don't want to 'hide' anything in the book 
by having different content for different situations.

   -- Bruce