I think quite the opposite, while Buildroot is really nice for professional use from someone who doesn't know kconfig and advanced makefile usage trying to know how Buildroot builds stuff is somewhat difficult. PTXdist is another great tool and is a bit eaiser to understand as it only uses kconfig and a few bash scripts and simple makefiles. Then there is Yocto / bitbake which is basically based off of Gentoo's ebuilds... But the reason I've spent a lot of time looking at these projects is a bit of a story...
I've been trying to work on getting my own distribution started from scratch myself, while LFS is a great starting point I needed to have multiple architectures. (For now I'm targeting just x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64) Which the current implementation of LFS is only applicable if you have a host with the same arch that your targeting. I've spent about maybe 9 to 15 months scripting, cross compiling, and researching this thing. Even tried looking at other projects that have somewhat simple bootstrapping processes that use musl such as Dragora Linux, Alpine Linux and Ataraxia Linux to bootstrap everything. However I couldn't really get to a good point in the compilation process where I can chroot into it and start building stuff. Might I note a year or so ago I didn't know much about toolchains, embedded buildtools, etc. but I did have a deep love for embedded.
Now with these new LFS news and the changes that there are proposing / have implemented it seems that cross compiling for other archs will be a little easier since you have a good starting point to branch off of for other architectures (Though solely on your own or via lfs-hints if people are inclined to submit their alterations.). As of right now I'm running the first 3rd of the new development book, was able to write up a quick bootstrap script and bootstrap folder structure to get things going. So pretty excited about these new LFS changes and how they will pan out in the coming months.
EDIT: Forgot to add, before anybody makes any assumptions. No, it's not going to be another desktop distro. It's purely focused on server machines (No GUI) with a focus on distributed systems think CoreOS / Clear Linux.
I have mixed feelings about make. On one hand, it's horrible. On the other hand, it's outlived all the competition, and will certainly be around in decades. And if you are a C programmer, you need to understand make anyway.
I have used Yocto quite a bit and it's nice. But embedded systems tend to be pretty simple.
What I would actually like to see is a modern scripting language like lua or Scheme embedded in the make binary.
I like the idea of an embedded OS for running containers. There is actually quite a bit of support in systemd for that. So it might be as simple as Buildroot with systemd init plus a mechanism for managing system updates.
I've been trying to work on getting my own distribution started from scratch myself, while LFS is a great starting point I needed to have multiple architectures. (For now I'm targeting just x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64) Which the current implementation of LFS is only applicable if you have a host with the same arch that your targeting. I've spent about maybe 9 to 15 months scripting, cross compiling, and researching this thing. Even tried looking at other projects that have somewhat simple bootstrapping processes that use musl such as Dragora Linux, Alpine Linux and Ataraxia Linux to bootstrap everything. However I couldn't really get to a good point in the compilation process where I can chroot into it and start building stuff. Might I note a year or so ago I didn't know much about toolchains, embedded buildtools, etc. but I did have a deep love for embedded.
Now with these new LFS news and the changes that there are proposing / have implemented it seems that cross compiling for other archs will be a little easier since you have a good starting point to branch off of for other architectures (Though solely on your own or via lfs-hints if people are inclined to submit their alterations.). As of right now I'm running the first 3rd of the new development book, was able to write up a quick bootstrap script and bootstrap folder structure to get things going. So pretty excited about these new LFS changes and how they will pan out in the coming months.
EDIT: Forgot to add, before anybody makes any assumptions. No, it's not going to be another desktop distro. It's purely focused on server machines (No GUI) with a focus on distributed systems think CoreOS / Clear Linux.