Porting to anything

[Andreas Enge]

The currently unsatisfying situation, according to "HACKING", is that 
bootstrapping guix essentially starts by installing (and thus in the worst 
case porting) nix.

I have spent the evening working on a shell script automating the 
compilation of the bootstrap binaries. Unsurprisingly, I end up 
reprogramming in shell part of make-bootstrap.scm. (In particular, it cost 
me some time to understand how to obtain statically linked binaries of the 
binutils.) And I am only halfway through, and maybe made some errors in the 
process that will only reveal themselves later.

So I wonder whether the dependency on nix is essential in make-
bootstrap.scm. Could one not renounce at working in a chroot with defined 
inputs from nix, and execute the exact same code in the current 
environment, using the programs available in the current system from the 
user's path? Then guix could be bootstrapped easily on any gnu/linux 
system.

Andreas