Before I built LFS, I had only a rough idea of the internals of the C build system and Linux runtime. Basically, I just knew that I had a recent GCC and some su

Before I built LFS, I had only a rough idea of the internals of the C build system and Linux runtime. Basically, I just knew that I had a recent GCC and some surface-visible tools like make, autoconf etc. and most software built just fine when I needed it to. The process of bootstrapping a clean GCC that operates in a chroot-jail and then using that to construct build a system from the ground up -- kernel, glibc and all -- gives great insight into the dependencies and build process of each of these basic packages. It's great that the Linux world has become so sugar-coated, and typical build instructions for source packages nowadays can be as simple as a list of apt-get packages to install followed by "./configure && make && sudo make install" but this glosses over an awful lot, and turns your build and runtime dependencies into a black box.