History

glaucus started as a personal research project in early 2018.

glaucus was previously known as “snail”.

snail

snail was an Automated Linux From Scratch distribution with alternatives (PCC, TCC, ELF Tool Chain, elfutils, musl, sbase, ubase, sinit, svc and dash).

snail had a read-only file system.

snail was only bootable under QEMU.

snail lacked a proper service manager.

snail had a subpar unix user space.

snail was not able to bootstrap.

snail was not able to self-host.

Design Changes

Cross-compiling vs native chroot

”/usr” merge, without “sbin”

Switch to libarchive as the default archive and compression library.

Switch to LibreSSL as the default TLS library.

Switch to NetBSD’s Editline Library and curses.

Switch to toybox as the default unix user space.

Switch to s6 as the default init system.

Switch to s6-rc as the default unix shell.

Switch to yash as the default unix shell.

Switch to zstd as the default compression algorithm.

First Release

First release was in August 31st, 2019.