Linux without the GNU toolchain 5111

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:31:25 -0400, Jean-David Beyer

See note 1.

Jean-David, I appreciate the sentiment but I am afraid that you may have placed a spin on my question before answering it (quite understandable given the experiences that you cite below :-)

Obviously one could rewrite everything from scratch, and it would be a lot of work and not much fun. What would be interesting is to learn how many alternative tools already exist that could take over from GNU tools - vide my quoting the claim for TCC.

No. I would like to know what would actually be NECESSARY to rewrite or discover in order to get a bootable system running on a Linux kernel, ˆ la Linux From Scratch.

I'm not so curious about what would be required to recreate, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux in its entirety.

Please do note that the GNU tools, while excellent in their way, do tend to have a million options that, while convenient in certain situations, are not strictly needed. I would contend that one might not need completely featured direct replacements, and that many GNU tools do not lie on critical paths in the toolchain, and so may not be needed.

I've got a pretty good pile of experience with large projects on or in intimately. But answering the question I pose doesn't require a commitment to follow through on coding or testing, so I think we can afford to approach it in a detached manner.

Your response is greatly appreciated, as would be your further thoughts as they develop.

1 That was the first answer I came up with too, but then I plucked up the courage-foolhardiness to ask anyway :-) -- mark south: world citizen, net denizen