Even extension creation should be automated somewhat as much as possible.
My extensions are. This is how I calculated the 4562 figure. I rather doubt anyone else could use my highly-customized script, but I agree: automating it is helpful. My extensions would never get updated, otherwise. Here's a rough description of my script:
1) Create a temporary directory for the following steps.
2) Extract tinycore.gz.
3) Extract compiletc deps and any other extensions required to build the source.
4) Chroot into the directory, perform a few initialization steps, then build from source.
5) Remove all files extracted in steps 2 and 3, leaving only the binaries built in the previous step.
That much isn't too difficult to automate, but the next steps are real time savers:
6) Package remaining files into a base extension with -dev, -doc, and -lib extensions as appropriate.
7) Create a .list and .md5.txt file for each extension.
8) Create a .info using a
T2 desc file as a template.
9) Run ldconfig recursively on every file to create a list of required libraries.
10) Search the tce directory for extensions containing those libraries and create a .dep file (
not comprehensive).
11) Audit using a customized version of the
extension audit script.
12) Package all of the generated files into a bcrypted tar for submission.
Bugs in my script cause Jason grief on occasion (a good reason to not distribute it), but the concepts are worth sharing. They could be discussed and refined in the scripting forum, so I might do that.