tag: #lfs

Building Linux From Scratch means living without a package manager for the duration, and the absence teaches you what the presence was doing all along. apt install is one command. Underneath it is dependency resolution, ordering, conflict detection, file tracking, and clean removal, all of which you do by hand under LFS, and all of which you stop noticing the moment you have a package manager to do them for you.

Seven years ago I built Linux From Scratch for the first time and understood maybe sixty percent of what I was doing. Last week I built it again on 13.0-systemd, and the second build turned out to be the clearest benchmark I have of what seven years of this work actually added up to.