[cloudripper]

Fair questions. If the question is "why did I need to chmod those files", the answer is that permissions modifications in the mkderivation build environment are not propagated to the build output. The quick and dirty solution I came up with was to make a chmod wrapper that logged the calls so that I could apply them after the entire build completed.

For why I did not chmod the directories - that is something I should probably do when I get time again (cleaning up permissions handling more broadly). In my case at the time, I had the logs from the wrappers and did a quick filter before directly adding them to the script as a last hurdle to having a bootable machine after a month-long grind.

The kernel config handling needs a good amount of attention too. I have a cleaner approach to that in mind that I haven't had the opportunity to work on.

It will likely be December before I am able to invest much more time into it, but definitely open to any input generally.

[MuffinFlavored]

> The kernel config handling needs a good amount of attention too.

https://github.com/cloudripper/NixLFS/blob/64e333f60cca4bec5...

Could you speak a bit about why you did it this way instead of maintaining a complete copy of the kernel .config you wanted?

[cloudripper]

There's a couple reasons for that.

First, for my initial attempt at the project I wanted to make as close of an adaptation from LFS guidance to Nix that I could. While I did sprinkle in some custom kernel configurations (from BLFS guidance), I otherwise tried to make a direct adaption from the book. The LFS guidance for the kernel build uses `make menuconfig`. That requires user interaction which, as far as I am aware, is not feasible in a Nix derivation (and really wouldn't make sense to achieve reproducibility as far as I understand the term). So I used `make defconfig` within the derivation and attempted to sed the kernel .config to achieve a matching config to that of LFS guidance (coupled with a few sprinkles of custom configs). In retrospect, I don't like how that block currently flows and would like to make it a bit cleaner and easier to declare configuration preferences.

Second, my approach with the entire project was to limit external inputs to the derivations with the goal of trying to be as reproducible as I could. If I recall correctly, the only external inputs used in the whole project were the sources and patches provided by the LFS project. That said, I hadn't considered that it might be a lot simpler to set it up in a "Bring Your Own Config" kind of way. I will stew on that more and would definitely be open to more thoughts on either and/or another approach.