Re. gen_init_cpio, I'm building a pretty barebones kernel indeed, without an init ramdisk. Building it from hand was effortless though, so no real problem there.

@Mircea Popescu:

> I came to this point where I loathe having to go through man for instance

Not only this, but there's plenty of real documentation missing from them or otherwise misplaced, e.g. constants to system calls and the likes. And even when said #defines are there, the descriptions are so vague that it's near damn impossible not to botch some piece of code proceeding from them.

> Why, incidentally ?

Filesystems don't provide any guarantees regarding the order of entries in a directory; nor do I think that they should, but this brings forth the necessity of some way to sort them.

> In which vein lettuce never forget

Fucking hell, yes, there's nothing there worth using besides LC_ALL=C.

@Jacob Welsh:

> Sorry about the tar --sort troubles

For the record, I don't think that's my fault, nor mine, but of those who wrote the manpages mentioned above. Even the muchly contempted PHP states explicitly all the versions implementing some functionality, whereas tar, a "standard" system utility has nothing of the sort, even the change history keeps being buried under piles of new "versions".

So IMHO it's worth stating in the documentation that some command is expected to have certain flags available, which in the end would lead us to a complete enumeration of system utilities and the functionality they provide, which IMHO would be worth at least as much as the current POSIX spec.

> The localization thing is one drawback to musl

For the record, I wholeheartedly agree with signalling the Republican point of view.

> Not sure how much that matters.

Since people do boot their stuff off the network, then I suppose network mounts aren't all that irrelevant either. I'm not worrying about that for now though.

> Yes, except for the tar thing (and one can simply omit the --sort for now).

That's great news, actually! I'll give self-bootstrapping a spin sometime and report back.

> Why, incidentally ?

@Mircea Popescu: the dream is to have installer binaries that come out the same no matter what system you bootstrap from. Left to its own devices tar enumerates directories in arbitrary (presumably filesystem) order.

> Piping should do this just fine, I'd think.

Recalling that tar takes file names through argv, which has a limited length, but tar output is concatenative, I come up with:

find DIR -type f -o -type l -print0 | LC_ALL=C sort -z | xargs -0 tar -cf - | gzip > DIR.tar.gz

This misses empty directories. But see also http://fixpoint.welshcomputing.com/2019/gales-linux-initial-release/#comment-182 .

The localization thing is one drawback to musl - though its implementation is limited, they see this as a problem and have been expanding it. Not that we have to import their decisions past any given point, but it could complicate reviewing their changes for possibly-important fixes.

> Since I went through the trouble of installing a Debian as a bootstrapper system, I used the very same environment for installation, but maybe there are use cases for booting the initramfs that I haven't seen.

@spyked: nothing wrong with doing it that way i.e. installing to a secondary drive (virtual or physical). I find the initramfs approach nicely flexible though in that nothing needs to be mounted after boot. For instance, with a freestanding install environment you can install to a single-drive system while fully repartitioning it, if you're careful. It can also provide a recovery boot option in the event you hose your root partition in some way.

Of course an initramfs with the appropriate utilities & scripts also enables root fs on fancier devices like lvm, LUKS, software RAID or network. Not sure how much that matters.

Sounds like @Diana Coman has it re building gen_init_cpio.

> which brings me to my following point: is Gales self-bootstrappable?

Yes, except for the tar thing (and one can simply omit the --sort for now).

Sorry the disk usage note was anti-helpful, I'll have to take a closer look on the next pass. I didn't pull the 3G out of nowhere but perhaps the final build tree size is lower than some intermediate step.

Is it just me that's meanwhile developed a serious issue reading anything not in standard republican format ? I came to this point where I loathe having to go through man for instance, because fuck that scrolling style and where's the footnotes and the links and wtf is this.

For eons I had been doing x --help | grep q, x --help | grep r, s, t, u, v in endless succession, and it always sucked, but by now it's also become intolerable.

> Moving on, the bootstrapper uses tar with the --sort flag,

Why, incidentally ?

> which unfortunately was my case.

It is almost universally the case, I for instance generally have 1.22

> unless this also turns out to be a can of worms

Piping should do this just fine, I'd think.

> Even proceeding from POSIX doesn't sound like such a bad idea to me

I don't think maintaining posix is avoidable. Though as recently alluded on trinque's site, it'll prolly be a standard matured off what the heathens call "199209" (as opposed to "200112"). In which vein lettuce never forget

23 Sort does not sort in normal order!

Why is sort not sorting correctly?

Some years ago at the time of transition to locale aware libc routines this question arose very often. With the passage of time most people have learned about this behavior and workarounds are quite well known. But the question is still raised often. It is most often due to having LANG set to ‘en_US.UTF-8’ set in your user environment. At that point sort appears broken because case is folded and punctuation is ignored because ‘en_US.UTF-8’ specifies this behavior. Once specifically requested by LANG and other LC_* variables, sort and other locale knowledgeable programs must respect that setting and sort according to the operating system locale tables. That is why this is not a bug in sort, sort is doing the right thing, even if the behavior is generally undesirable. Most of the language specific locales have tables that specify the sort behavior to ignore punctuation and to fold case. This is counter intuitive to most long time computer users!

Of course locales are a blessing to non-english speaking computer users. Many languages use non-ASCII fonts and character sets. The POSIX standards and the GNU utilities support those by using the installed system library sorting routines. By using locales languages can specify a specific ordering. This can be done by a translator well after the program has been written and by translators not known by the program author. It is a dynamic change to the program. However, when those tables exhibit an undesired behavior then it can also break an otherwise correct program. If locale tables force a locale specific collation sequence when a standard collation sequence was desired then this is most noticeable with the sort command and so it bears the full force of the problem.

This locale sorting behavior is configured in your environment. This is due to the fact that you or your vendor have set environment variables that direct the program to use locale specific sorting tables which do not sort as you expect. You or your vendor have probably set environment variables such as LANG, LC_COLLATE, or LC_ALL to ‘en_US.UTF-8’. The locale collating table selected by the locale setting is not part of the GNU program but part of your vendor’s system release.

To select a standard sort ordering simply set LC_ALL to ‘C’ or ‘POSIX’.

Fuck the fucking "non-english speaking" morons. They have no business touching the machines, off to the ovens with them, what the fuck, C programs written in arabic ? It ain't ever gonna happen, nor is the dumbphone ruminant ever touching anything to do with computers.

Nobody, let me say it again, NOBODY was yet helped in any way to any degree by the attempts to make computers moron-tolerant. The intended market still didn't get on computers, thirty years later, but found yet-another sort of amiga to mindlessly & uncomprehendingly mash the buttons off of. None of the retards on fetlife misrepresenting themselves through stolen pictures ever sorted anything ; for lack of enough mental power as'd support the sort of curiosity directed towards the outside world such as would be capable of producing large enough collections for sorting to be even meaningful to them as an activity. Watch them "work", they do it "manually" -- like everything else in their bovine, inconsequential lives. Because that's what they fucking are. Libc ain't about to "change them", no matter what it does, just like the women that spawn them ain't gonna "change" anything.

Re gen_init_cpio iirc there's a setting in the kernel config so possibly you didn't have that option set so it wasn't built (some old notes of mine say CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD fwiw).