[J-core] How crazy would a nommu debian port be?

[Rob Landley]

There used to be an emdebian but it's no longer maintained.

I have a "smallest system capable of rebuilding under itself" project,
under which I've built linux from scratch and which I'd like to use to
bootstrap full distributions on an arbitrary host. (I.E. build a debian
environment wherein you can build debian packages and populate a
repository.)

  http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#hairball

That's been a longstanding goal of mine which I've just been to busy to
do much work on recently. I've done a lot of research, but the result is
always that distro builds are really, really incestuous.

Anyway, debian's "reproducible builds" initiative seems like a step in
the right direction for this:

  https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Because in order to make it work they have to take control of their
build environment, meaning the fact Fedora 24 can _only_ build under
Fedora 23 (not under Fedora 22 and not even under Fedora 24!) is exactly
the sort of nonsense they have to clean up to make reproducible builds
work. And if they have a manifest of what their environment requires,
then we can build it ourselves and supply it, and build debian under
something other than debian (such as aboriginal linux).

And THAT means we can start swapping out parts, using musl instead of
their libc, and testing each component to make sure it works on nommu...

Anyway, seems like a possible thing, I'm just wondering how much
interest there would be out there for something like that. The numato
board only has 64M ram and nommu means no swap. I'm not sure how
interesting modern debian is to run there?)

Rob