Hi folks, I've been putting this mail off for a long time, but I finally decided to get some initial toolchain going, and it seems to work quite well so far. So this is crux-bin, a little community project that builds binary packages for crux. My project goals so far are: - because the system on the build machine is really lightweight, it makes it easier to find out about footprint mismatches and missing dependencies. This is probably the most important for people who don't actually intend to use my packages. I will report anything that breaks, be prepared for a flood in the bugtracker ;) - The obvious: Build binary packages for crux; This is similar to BSD where ports as well as binary packages are being built. Since crux is influenced by BSD, why not? ;) If you're familiar with BSD, you might notice that the directory hierarchy is similar to the ftp trees of the major BSD distributions. - A crux-specific source mirror: Most of the source mirrors out there seem to be for gentoo, which often means they are outdated or certain files are missing. Since I have to download the source files anyway in order to build the packages, I decided to download them from the original website only (which helps finding md5 mismatches, another side-effect), sort them by ports collection and put them into rsync. The build isn't automated yet, but I'll hack something together that will notify me if something breaks and build automated once a day via cron otherwise. Packages are stripped down to a minimal set after build to eliminate implicit dependencies. If you want these implicit dependencies, you can always build from source. I'll explain the details on demand. Things that are planned for the future (volunteers? ;) - A binary package manager. We have pkg-get, but it's simply not made to play nicely on a lot of different setups, and requires custom files. crux-bin contains only ordinary crux packages, because everything else is assumed to be in the ports tree. Maybe something that integrates nicely with prt-get by changing the "addcommand" and "makecommand" to default to binary packages for some few binary packages would be nice. - There are currently no x86_64 packages. I'm building this in an lxc-jail on a 32-bit ubuntu (the host system needs to run some old, 32-bit only software) on a spare i7 at work. If anyone wants to help out, be my guest, although I might wind up with something. I personally don't use 64-bit crux at all, because I only own 32-bit machines, so this feels a little pointless.. Thanks to pitillo and sepen for prt-clean and prologic for the offer to mirror my efforts! See rsync://crux-bin.wzff.de/ for a list of what's currently there, but it might still take a while until DNS is in sync. Note: This announcement will probably be my only mail regarding crux-bin to any of the official crux mailing lists since this is an entirely unofficial community effort that's not really related to the real crux and I don't want to spam anyone's inbox with emails about a project spinoff they don't care about, however there is a mailing list at crux-bin@lists.barfooze.de to which anyone interested can subscribe by sending a mail to crux-bin+subscribe@lists.barfooze.de. Best regards, Moritz