Creating distro build tooling for a small community
10 points by q66
10 points by q66
I use Void Linux for many years now and in the past I dabbled with a distribution project based on it so this was a very interesting post for me.
I would say that xtools lints are kinda required, because they are usually run before a package would be accepted. At least that was my experience.
Void is simple, fast and it is quite easy to make a new package for it, but it does have a few complexities hidden under a rug like with staging and triggers as mentioned in the post. I explored this area a bit wanting to make an immutable distribution I wanted to keep modification dates stable, because I aimed at reproducibility to some extent. At the same time because how simple it is it is quite easy to bootstrap it. With Python it traditionally was much worse, but I guess there are now some ways to overcome it somewhat.
Once in a while I eye other distributions and it certainly made me interested in Alpine (again) and Chimera as well. Even if I would go with an immutable distribution I would still have then rw distribution somewhere as a container.
How is Chimera for a laptop?
Does anyone know the song "Merchant of the Void"? :)
it depends on what you mean by bootstrap; if you mean compile from source on another linux distribution, it does not make a difference (python is not a part of the stage0 bootstrap path)
if you mean bootstrap absolutely from scratch, python is one of the smaller issues, it builds very simply and has minimal and trivial dependencies that you're likely going to need already (autotools, optionally compression libraries - zlib, bz2, zstd, expat, openssl, sqlite, libffi, on most setups also libedit or readline, but that's optional too)
chimera works fine on a laptop (i'm running it on a latest panther lake laptop and everything works as expected)