Journal jd's Journal: Thoughts about Linux 1
Someone suggested writing their own Linux distro. That's what I did, back in the day before decent distros. Now we're post-decent, that might not be such a bad idea. But how would you structure it?
My thinking is that you could have some basic, tested, packages that you're sure work fine, plus an automated test suite, plus some cross-compilers and some VM images.
Person X requests a distro and wants a basic. They get the basic, precompiled version.
Person Y requests a distro, wants it tuned and runs a tuning app. This gives a rundown on hardware present. The cross compilers then build optimised binaries for that platform, omitting unwanted drivers and including normally disabled options that can be exploited. This is tested on the VM using the automated tests. Anything that fails the test gets swapped for the basic binaries. Person Y gets emailed their distro is now available for download.
Person Z requests the distro for a normally unsupported platform for which the tuning binary has been built. Same as above, but features that fail the test don't get included.
This gives you the same sort of flexibility as gentoo, without having to mess with flags personally and without having to have the horsepower to compile everything at a decent speed, with the added bonuses that the site can serve the distro to multiple people with similar hardware (so build once, serve many), better testing to avoid hardware quirks, and with easier flag handling for such corner cases.
In principle, this means you have to write thorough automated test suites, but only have to produce a handful of validated releases to support a far wider range of situations.
Slackware distro.. (Score:1)
From ,the article, what you are asking for is all possible and done in the Slackware distro.
At install (and after wards) you can choose what you want (too much to list it all here).
It is one of the first exsisting ever, just started after SLS and now more then 25 years around. ;) Latest version: 15.0 released on Feb 2, 2022
And yes.. I'm a slackie and first used it 1995 and got married to it