Mastodon Linux
My Linux
distribution, which features a primarily BSD Unix userland, a
completely a.out set of systems programs (to avoid the wonderland
of gl*bc backwards incompatability), and a lot of experimental
things I'm playing with.
The most recent version is
INST0066, which
is no longer all that recent (~7 years old), but I'm trying to
decide whether to roll to one of the super-bloated newer Linux
kernels or write my own USB stack plus SATA and UDMA drivers for
2.0.28. The advantage of rolling to one of the newer Linux
kernels is that the work is all done, but the disadvantage is
that modern Linux is in a symbiotic relationship with a large
mass of GNU code and replacing the kernel means replacing a
huge variety of other code just to get the damned thing to
build. Plus the new kernel source tarballs are over 300mb
unpacked, which would tend to completely fill / on many of the
flash root filesystems I've got on my servers.
Things that need to be done are
- define a filesystem hierarchy.
- find a libc (not glibc;
I need to ship glibc so that third-party tools can work, but even
with having to completely rebuild glibc [so that I don’t have to
deal with the nasty nss plugin libraries that it uses] it’s still
too much of a moving target) that I can link systems programs
with.
- redo the installer. The days of the single-floppy
install are probably long gone, and I'm going to have to ship a
mini-ISO image that holds the installer.
- After working with
commercial Linuxes for a few years now, I've begun to believe that
there is some merit to using some sort of package management scheme.
But which one? One that writes to a package database (with a backup
to text files in case the package database goes south), or one that
simply writes, slowly, to a collection of textfiles?
- I need a
SCCS. Probably Git, because that supports
archive cloning (which I became very fond of after using
the last SCCS that the Linux kernel used.)
- In association with
the SCCS, I also need to reconnect with the people who've volunteered
to help with Mastodon and ask them if they want to do it again.
- Set up a wiki so that anyone who wants to contribute to the project can
add commentary about it.
- Oh,
and I should make this a nicer looking webpage.