I am attempting to bootstrap Prefix on SLES 12. Several of the packages available on this system are not suitable for building modern packages required by both stable and testing Prefix. While it's trivial to compile these packages and stick them in a location somewhere, users are required to edit the bootstrap.sh script to prefix these locations to the bootstrap shell PATH: https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/proj/prefix.git/tree/scripts/bootstrap-prefix.sh#n2517 ``` # the standard path we want to start with, override anything from # the user on purpose PATH="/usr/bin:/bin" ``` While prefix _should_ detect and automatically bootstrap additional build-time tools as required, it does not currently do so. Instead/at the very least we should provide users with a mechanism to prefix to this PATH, intentionally, so that things like updated compilers as environment modules or replacements for deficient system dependencies can be found by the prefix environment.
We should probably add the tools and their checks so we can bootstrap them in stage1, and then you could think of something like using homebrew or anything else to aid the initial bootstrap, for which you'd have to supply a path (akin to /usr/sfw/bin). It could be the path would simply be a (symlink) in the to be bootstrapped EPREFIX, e.g. EPREFIX/external-bin. But in particular SLES is known to be very liberal in changing behaviour of packages, so we really really want to use as little as possible from it.
