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.

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, you will likely end 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, you can configure your 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 stack 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).

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 that is technically from BLFS but that package is shell script only and I may wait until after SystemD is RPM bootstrapped since it uses a SystemD timer unit to run once a week.

With all of the major deviations packaged except make-ca (waiting until after SystemD is packaged), the order I am following is pretty much the order in the LFS book starting with Chapter Five. I am 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 are fairly similar to the Chapter 8 build instructions.

I might actually build SSH2 and Git before proceeding to LFS Chapter 8 stuff just so I can use Git without needing to reboot into another GNU/Linux install first. They (and needed dependencies) would be built with RPM from the start.

Once GCC is finished and Util-Linux (not yet started) is finished, the plan is to pause and audit each spec file, making sure things like the specified license is correct and other things, before proceeding with RPM bootstrapping the packages in Chapter 8 that are not already RPM packaged.

I may have to do the kernel sooner as there are some kernel options I should have enabled but did not. My intent is for RPM itself to be the very last package I RPM bootstrap before going on to the next phase (building dnf and mock).