CSCRATCH
Casita From-Scratch Linux

This file describes CSCRATCH, an in-place system build facility. 

What is CSCRATCH?

The name CSCRATCH is a contraction for "Casita Scratch".  It is one of several from-scratch build schemes, but is not restricted to Linux.  CSCRATCH also can coexist with Your Favorite Distro: You can use it to build or rebuild packages on SuSE, RedHat, FreeBSD, theoretically any POSIX platform.  Given a working POSIX or POSIX-like system, you can many of its component packages with fresh and/or updated versions from source using CSCRATCH. 

CSCRATCH is usually available from La Casita at

    http://www.casita.net/pub/cscratch/ 

CSCRATCH attempts to stay as close as possible to the original Internet sources for all packages. All distributions, even Debian (as re-doable as it is), have their own substantial modifications to the package sources. CSCRATCH has few or none. 

How Does One Use CSCRATCH?

Using CSCRATCH is easy: 

•	download the makefile 
•	build one or more packages 

[need more detail] 

What Packages Does CSCRATCH Support?

The current suite of successfully built and installed packages includes ...

Is There A Release Plan for CSCRATCH?

There is no version/release/mod number for CSCRATCH.  All we use is the date.  Not very original. 

The 2008 release will probably be the last version of CSCRATCH to support "i386".  By that, I mean that we us a real 386 to [re]build CSCRATCH.  The machine is just too slow to use anymore for buliding systems. (Though it doubtless still has value for some applications.) 

Defining Packages to CSCRATCH

Each package is defined by a makefile fragment which is included into core CSCRATCH make logic. 
The file must have an extension of ".mk" and must at least set the SC_VRM and SC_URL variables. 

SC_VRM
There is no default.  This is version/release/mod. 

SC_URL
There is no default.  This URL indicates where the source may be downloaded. 

SC_FETCH
The default is to retrieve the source URL, which should included a gzipped tarfile. 
You may set it to $(SC_FETCH_BZ) if the source is only available with bzip2 compression. 

SC_SOURCE
This is the name of the source directory.  By default it is set to $(SC_VRM). 

SC_BUILDD
This is the name of the build directory.  By default it is set to $(SC_SOURCE). 

SC_CONFIG
This is the command to configure the package. 
The default is './configure' but sometimes you may need './configure --prefix=/usr'. 

SC_BUILD
This is the command to build the package. 
The default is simply 'make'. 

SC_INSTALL
This is the command to install the package. 
The default is simply 'make install'. 

SC_FIXUP
This command performs any post processing after installation. 
The default is no fixup post processing. 

-- R;