Stages for boot-strapping a distribution

Stage 1 -- bash-static, binutils, bison, coreutils, diffutils, e2fsutils-static, ed, findutils, flex, gawk, gcc, glibc, grep, grub, gzip-static, linux-kernel, m4, make, mdadm, patch, sed, sysvinit-static, tar-static, util-linux

Stage 2 -- gettext, groff, ncurses, readline, zlib

Stage 3 -- at, bash, bc, cpio, cups, dcron, elvis, file, hdparm, less, man, mktemp, mt-st, ncurses-fallback, net-tools, netkit-base, netkit-ftp, netkit-telnet, netkit-tftp, procmail, procps, psmisc, rsync, shadow, sysklogd, texinfo, time, which

Optional -- ispell, linux-ftpd, lynx, perl, pine

See the document bootstrap-explain for more explanation about why packages are built in this order.