Bootstrapping LFS 12.2 (SystemD) with RPM

This git contains the RPM spec files and text sources/patches not retrievable easily from a hyperlink for RPM bootstrapping my LFS 12.2 SystemD system.

The is ‘Phase Four’ of THE-PLAN.md.

Many of the spec files are ported from my previous (incomplete) RPM bootstrap of my LFS 11.3 SysV Init system but due to a hard drive failure, some of those RPM spec files were lost and I need to start over.

The RPM spec files committed today (20 October 2024 UTC) all build except for the GCC RPM which is being worked on. With GCC, currently there are installed files that need to be put into the correct place. Also, I need to add m2 to the list of compilers and create a sub-package for it.

(update: gcc spec file now builds)

The Perl spec file builds packages but needs to be split up into lots of smaller packages. For RPM bootstrapping, that does not matter. That is a lot of tedious work but the value is a small bug fix in a bundled module can then be updated via RPM without needing to rebuild all of Perl.

The GLibC spec file initially had a bug. Other packages detect they need rtld(GNU_HASH) which was supposed to be provided by GLibC but RPM was not detecting that it provided it.

Initially I thought maybe there was an RPM runtime dependency I did not have causing RPM to not detect that GLibC provided it despite being able to detect that other packages needed it. However after looking at the ‘Fedora 42’ RPM spec file for their glibc package, what they do is hard-code it:

Provides: rtld(GNU_HASH)

It bothers me a little bit that RPM will auto-detect a dependency it does not have the ability to detect in the package that provides it, but it is what it is I suppose.

Many of the spec files undoubtedly need work. Many undoubtedly have missing BuildRequires and other packaging mistakes.

Duplicate Documentation

By default, LFS/BLFS does not compress man or info pages. By default, RPM uses gzip compression on man and info pages. Thus when RPM bootstrapping an LFS system, one typically ends up with two copies of each man and info page.

One solution is to gzip all man and info pages before the RPM bootstrap. That way the files on the file system will have the same file name as the file names in the RPM files. Similarly, one can configure the RPM build environment to NOT gzip the man and info pages. Then once the bootstrap is complete, revert it to gzip in future package builds. However, I just use a shell script to find and delete the duplicates. Since RPM compresses them and the script only deletes the uncompressed duplicates, it does not remove files under RPM management.

The shell script remove_duplicates.sh can be used to remove the duplicates. Run it once a day or so during the RPM bootstrap process, definitely after installing RPM packaged Perl for the first time.

Bootstrap Build Order

The build order is not too important. At the start, the --nodeps switch is often needed because both library and runtime dependencies are in fact present but not yet under RPM management, so the RPM database does not know about them.

I started with the kernel-abi-headers package because it would be easy to restore that noarch package if something went wrong, and I followed that with the vim package because it tested a binary build and again would be easy to restore the package if something went wrong.

I deviated from the LFS instructions for the OpenSSL API stack, using LibreSSL as my default library for the OpenSSL API and only using OpenSSL for Python which does not support building against LibreSSL. To accomplish that in the LFS build, LibreSSL was installed with a prefix of /usr and OpenSSL was installed with a prefix of /opt/openssl.

With RPM management, both can be built with a prefix of /usr with the only hitch being the -devel package for both can not be installed at the same time.

So next I rebuilt libressl followed by openssl with a /usr prefix, allowing me to temporarily uninstall the libressl-devel package so I could install the openssl-devel package and rebuild python3 linking against OpenSSL libraries in /usr/lib instead of in /opt/openssl/lib and the /opt/openssl directory could be deleted.

The openssl-devel package was then uninstalled and libressl-devel restored so that other packages that want the OpenSSL API and can link against LibreSSL to get it would do so. I just personally have higher trust in the LibreSSL developers and I do not care about FIPS certification.

LFS only builds libelf from ElfUtils but RPM requires libdwarf from ElfUtils so part of building RPM itself was rebuilding ElfUtils with libdwarf. I thus saw that as a deviation from LFS instructions, so next I built the full complete elfutils (using a eu- prefix on the binary utilities which are not needed).

With GCC I deviated by bootstrapping it with Ada (gnat) and D (gcd) support, I am working on a gcc RPM package that also builds all the other languages (similar to the BLFS build of GCC). My GCC build also includes the Integer Set Library. With GCC, ISL support can be added by unpacking the ISL source code into the GCC source code and making sure the directory is named isl (as opposed to, say, isl-0.26).

The gcc package now properly builds and is installed, although I still need to add m2 compiler support.

The only other major deviation from LFS is with the make-ca script which I patched to use the libressl binary instead of the openssl binary, to use curl to retieve new certdata.txt files, and to install with a default certdata.txt file so that certificate bundles could be generated even if it is installed off-line.

Initial Bootstrap Order

With all of the major deviations packaged, the order followed is pretty much the order in the LFS book starting with Chapter Five. I did not using the build instructions from the early chapters of the LFS book as those were for creating the build environment. Most of my build instructions were fairly similar to the Chapter 8 build instructions.

After packaging util-linux and thus completing the packages in the LFS book through Chapter 7, I decided I needed a change in strategy.

Intermission Bootstrapping

• First, I needed git inside the LFS system being RPM bootstrapped to reduce how often a reboot is needed, so I built openssh and git. Fortunately the spec files I had written for my LFS 11.3 RPM system needed very little modification.
• Secondly, I decided it would be good to package gdb and valgrind now, so that package test suites that do more extensive testing when those packages are available can do that testing.
• Thirdly, I need to come up with a so-called ‘best practices’ for RPM spec files that I can use to audit my spec files.

Currently I am working on getting gdb and valgrind packaged.

Then I can go through the LFS book Chapter 8 in order, even rebuilding the packages I already built so they have the benefit of gdb/valgrind in the test suite and the spec file audit.

Best Practices: RPM User and Group Dependency Notes

With new versions of RPM, if a specified file has user and/or group ownership other than root, RPM will make the existence of that user and/or group a package dependency.

Unfortunately RPM uses the facilities of systemd-sysusers.d to do so, even though system users and groups being defined in the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files are as old as UNIX itself, maybe even older?

With my util-linux package, RPM complained about needing group(tty) even though the group exists. With my openssh-server package, RPM again complained about needing group(sys) even though the group exists. This is just because those groups are not defined in a systemd-sysusers unit file. In fact the only systemd-sysusers file defined is for dbus which was installed from source after SystemD was installed.

I probably will create the systemd-sysusers unit files for the standard system users and groups expected to exist, however I do not like RPM requiring the management of users and groups through systemd-sysusers so that is being turned of via

%_use_weak_usergroup_deps 1

in the /etc/rpm/macros file. That macro affects the build of a package, packages built without that macro set to 1 will still have any non-root users and groups defined in the %files section as package dependencies.

Note that with macro, the RPM will still suggest a user or group, it just will not require the user or group.

LFS Chapter Eight Bootstrap

With the so-called ‘best practices’ developed and in hand, I will then package everything in LFS 12.2 Chapter 8 either auditing existing RPM spec files to bring them inline with the ‘best practices’ or writing brand new spec files where I do not currently have them.

Going through the packages in the Chapter 8 order, any package that has build or install dependencies RPM does not know about will have to have that dependency packaged. For example, SQLite3 is not in the LFS book but when present, Python3 will use it to make a Python module for it, so when I get to Python3, I will have to build an SQLite3 package if I have not already.

For the man-pages package, LFS packages it first because many of the man pages in it get replaced by man pages from other packages. I am actually going to change the install path to /usr/share/generic-man to avoid man page conflicts, and put it at the end of the man path so that man pages from that collection are only presented to the user if not provided by another package.

The rebuild of GCC in this phase is when I will add the m2 (GNU Modula-2) compiler support.

At this point, I will have a very good base and can go on to RPM bootstrapping the various BLFS packages (and a few outside of BLF) and then finally build the RPM package.