Is LFS LiveCD needed at all? [was: Re: splitting initramfs - worth doing or not?]

[Martin Miehe]

Dear Mr. Patrakov,

I tried to make it short when I answered your initial question, cause  
I did not want to bore anybody. Here is answer --verbose.

(1) Yes, cross compiling can make the build much faster. And yes, the  
lack of package manager could be a problem when you want to build  
updated packages on the faster machine. But there is no necessity of  
building them anywhere else. You are working at servers. They have to  
be very fast. I (and certainly some other people who are working with  
old or ancient computers, too) have a different attitude to time.  
Things take time on old machines and you get used to it. (Maybe you  
are understanding now, why you had to complain about this user of your  
LiveCD who lets you wait 24 hours every time.)
The only problem are people in software buisiness, who put all these  
cute and fuzzy features in their operating systems and programs  
without any possibility to get rid of this stuff. And yes, I know that  
there is a mutuate connection between pushing fater software and  
faster hardware, i.e. getting a lot of money from people who believe  
they need 1 GHz to run an office or to watch a DVD. The LFS-project is  
different: my distro, my rules. This is hard to find anywhere else.

(2) Debian GNU/Linux may be a good choice, too. I chose LFS because I  
came from another direction. I searched for mini-distros: small, fast,  
just a handful of files, easy to understand. Unfortunately their  
possibilities are quite limited. LFS is what I want. And by the way:  
The actual Debian needs at least 48 MB RAM on the x86 architecture. So  
LiveCD could very well be interesting for computers with less than 32  
MB.

(3) LiveCD seems to be the best way to do LFS. It is not the only way,  
but has a lot of advantages. Have you ever tried to download all the  
packages and patches with a 56k modem? Do you know how old most binary  
distros have to be to work with acceptable speed on an old computer?  
Do you know anybody who is interested in first upgrading a kernel 2.4  
system to 2.6 just to get rid of the upgraded system?
Of course, I would be able to continue the regular work, but since I  
am what would you call "newbie" I prefere to backup everything and to  
work on another computer. There I can still do everything that has to  
be done, while letting the first machine build LFS and crash as often  
as it would like to, because shit just happens.
And if I read the informations on the LFS homepage well, the first  
question I will be asked when searching help is: "Can you reproduce it  
with the LiveCD?" It makes things easier to have a reference system.

(4) No, the LiveCD is not needed - at least if you mean "necessary"  
when you say "needed". In this meaning the whole LFS project is not  
needed as well as software at all. The really important things can be  
done by hardware and people. But it is very useful.

In my opinion there is no need for understatement and fishing for compliments.

I appreciate your work.

M. Miehe.