aports VS musl-cross-make

alpkg is a tool for all your Alpine packaging needs. It can create a chroot with preinstalled tools in a matter of seconds, set up aports repository, and fetch/update packages. Most importantly, it provides a split layout via Zellij for easy editing/building APKBUILD files.

A nice feature of Alpine Linux is that the package repository is a relatively straightforwardly-structured git repository containing build scripts for each package:

https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/

It's worth reading the contributor guide[1] before signing up and providing any fixes and improvements - and from there, hopefully it's a relatively familiar workflow for many developers.

[1] - https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Contribute

1) docker and qemu (using qemu-user-static) 2) alpine-chroot-install (https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-chroot-install/) 3) bootstrap.sh (https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/blob/master/scripts/bootstrap.sh)

I've done the same alpine trick for static binaries but may I introduce you to musl-cross-make?

https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make

Just burned out static toolchains that make me static binaries for all architectures gcc supports. Much like musl.cc but they suggest building your own and I do.

I use these toolchains on debian (/ anywhere a non-ancient linux kernel runs) to make static binaries, you can too!

Python obviously isn't 14kb because its code is divided into hundreds of shared object files. So the way I like to measure things is using static executable size, using tools like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan or https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make of which you'll find a static build in the cosmo repo. For example, here's the technique I used to build TinyLISP was something like this:

I have a different issue with ring. This is on a custom Cortex A9 board at work. For most depedencies I can get compilation working fine with armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf. I was able to build the cross compiler using https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make , adding

A bit off topic, I hope someday GCC's build system gets overhauled. A huge advantage of LLVM is that it is quite easier to rebuild the runtime libraries without rebuilding the compiler. With GCC that's a pain, unless one takes the time to re-package GCC very carefully like https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make and https://exherbo.org/.

Maybe getting some new GCC devs in there with projects like this would help with that?