User:0xdc/substrate/20220101

Another year. Quite a lot of substrate/roflmaOS updates.

bindist
openssl[bindist] has been removed, so the elliptic curve headers are now available for distribution. As such, there is no need anymore to maintain a separate branch with un-distributable stages (except one, but I don't even use it).

So, for the first time, the stages include things like ansible and wpa_supplicant, and I can also include things with a  license, which includes the roflmaOS ISO files.

Improvements to plasma stages
I've even added a new plasma livecd, which is an almost complete livecd, and almost complete installation image. This works great on machines with intel graphics (particularly older ones which don't need firmware) to give you a working GUI/DE without compiling anything.

I say "almost complete", because we don't have anything doing firstboot activities like setting up a user account or setting an FDE password. These things don't exist in the other targets anyway.

plasma stage3 harfbuzz/freetype circular dependency
It should be well documented that when running a desktop/DE profile there is this circular dependency when building from source. There isn't a way for catalyst to be able to handle this without hurting the other non-plasma builds, so I patch this manually.

plasma stage4 docbook-xsl-ns-stylesheets / asciidoc
In the plasma stage4 build, the docbook-xsl-ns-stylesheets postinst step fails due to /run/lock missing. This leads to a failure when building asciidoc that kills the build. There is a bug (#816303) about it that says to reboot into the stage to create the directory on boot. That's not really possible during stage building, so I just create the directory before running run_merge:

Finally
With that all said and done, I've been wondering if this release will be the last for substrate. I've kinda reached the limits of where I'm willing to push catalyst and I want to customise the resulting distro a lot more.

mkosi recently gained Gentoo distro support and, while not able to create ISOs, could be a base to begin with.