i686 musl-libc linux distro

[acoul]

I apologize for this not being a bug request neither a feature request.

I am looking for advise for selecting a musl-libc i686 distro. Unfortunately, void-linux does not offer an i686 version. Alpine does, but firefox and the keyboard switch have quite painful issues under X.

The only other alternative I found is sabotage-linux that is actively developed, but I see no prebuild packages and rolling release maintenance.

Worth mentioning is, that building the world from source under 32bit alpine-linux is rock steady with the exception of complexity and unsuccess in building firefox.

What would be a good choice for a musl-libc linux/OS for old laptops ?

[rofl0r]

well sabotage linux is currently only build-from-source. that works also with old laptops... it just takes a while to compile the few huge packages (like kernel or firefox).
i think the only pre-compiled distros that use musl are openwrt, void, alpine.

[acoul]

thank you for your feedback rofl0r

my main concern, besides stability and size, is security updates and maintenance time. a rolling release with community binary packages is very charming.

hopefully sabotage, at some point, will possibly join the above list.

[rofl0r]

while we currently not have a lot of dedicated developers, we're trying to stay up-to-date in software packages that are susceptible to vulnerabilities like network services and browsers.
regarding binary packages, we currently did invest some time in getting packages like kernel and firefox (those that are updated most often and take the most time to build) to build reproducibly. so there are already some steps in place so we can at least offer these special packages as binary download. i don't think it's necessary to ship even packages that take like 10 seconds to compile even on moderate hardware precompiled though.
anyway, what i'm currently missing most is a second linux server with ssh access, so i could build the binary packages on both of them and only if the result is bit-identical, publish the result as binary download. so if you know somebody that could supply such a server that would help a lot!

[acoul]

I don't have access to such resources but point well taken and thank you.

Today I bummed onto the Open Build Service that it may be of some interest to this project.

[dreh23]

what i'm currently missing most is a second linux server with ssh access, so i could build the binary packages on both of them and only if the result is bit-identical, publish the result as binary download. so if you know somebody that could supply such a server that would help a lot!

Is this still an issue? Maybe I could cough up some resources.

I believe sabotage needs a CI system on every commit. This probably would offload quite some maintenance work. Are there any thoughts on your behalf?

[rofl0r]

yeah, a second server is still "most wanted".
i'm not sure if CI started from every commit is the way to go forward, since you'd have to build the entire distro from scratch every time, which takes hours even on a dedicated super-fast box. we used to have a service running on pkg.sabotage.tech (there are currently some troubles with that domain) which would rebuild the entire distro once a week. we switched servers recently and i've not yet reinstantiated the cronjob to do so though.

[dreh23]

Im on holidays now, when I come back I can see if I have spare resources I can dedicate, somewhere.