LFS Roadmap

[Matthew Burgess]

A number of people have emailed me privately, and its also come up on 
the list recently, so here's my thoughts on what could/should be going 
on in LFS land.  Yes, I know it's taken me far too long to ditch my 
Release Manager hat and don my Project Manager/Planner hat, but still..

LFS-6.2:

This will just be an incremental release, further stabilising our 
already proven PLFS-based build method.  GCC-3.4.x combined with 
Glibc-2.3.5 seems pretty robust, and adding binutils-2.16.1 to the mix 
should further solidify that.  Obviously, other packages will also be 
upgraded wherever possible (i.e. where shadow *isn't* broken, and up to 
a point where udev doesn't inflict an initrd on us!).

LFS-7.0:

Now, here's the biggy.  The jury's still out on this one :)  I'd like to 
see GCC-4.x in this one, but that's dependent on the stability of said 
compiler with the rest of the toolchain (Glibc in particular) and its 
effect on BLFS packages.  Additionally, of course, cross-lfs is to be 
seriously considered at this point.  I've not looked at Jim, Ryan, 
Jeremy and Manuel's work yet, for which I can only apologise (yes guys, 
*again*!).  So, anyone wanting to see what it's all about and comment on 
it, can see that branch of the book at 
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/cross-lfs/.

I also wanted to get some internationalisation work sorted out for LFS, 
as I have to admit to being somewhat embarassed seeing all the 
disclaimers dotted around the book stating that things don't work right 
in multibyte locales.  However, it looks like things are pretty largely 
broken using upstream releases without heavy patching.  Once things are 
looking a little more settled in the GCC-4 and cross-lfs areas, we might 
want to think about an i18n branch, so we can see exactly how big an 
effect it has on the book.

So, does anyone else have any feature requests/enhancements I've not 
listed above?  Anyone vehemently disagree with the above roadmap?  If 
so, I have a nearly-new hat available :)

Regards,

Matt.