Re: Bootstrap binaries

[Ludovic Courtès]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès writes:
>
>> Jookia <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 11:16:51AM +0200, Efraim Flashner wrote:
>>>> What about taking it a step further and having a multi-level bootstrap
>>>> process like when we have the core-updates? If we bootstrap away enough 
>>>> times
>>>> would we end up with the bootstrap binaries we have now?
>>>
>>> From what I understand the bootstrap binaries aren't reproducible yet.
>>
>> Depends on what kind of reproducibility we’re talking about.  It’s
>> simple to build bootstrap binaries:
>>
>>   
>> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Bootstrapping.html#Building-the-Bootstrap-Binaries
>>
>> I think they are all bit-for-bit reproducible (that is, you can use
>> --rounds=3 and everything is fine), except for Guile due to
>> <http://bugs.gnu.org/20272>.)
>>
>> However, if you build them today, you’ll obviously get something
>> different from the bootstrap binaries we currently use, which were from
>> Guile 2.0.9, libc 2.19, GCC 4.7.2, some old Coreutils, etc.
>>
>> HTH,
>> Ludo’.
>
> It seems like a good idea, once that bug in Guile is fixed, to move over
> to a new set of bootstrap binaries... even if this involves some
> difficulty for Guix users today.  It would certainly be a good thing to
> do before we hit 1.0, whenever that is.

I prefer to change those binaries as rarely as possible.  Intuitively
(and unscientifically), it gives more confidence to keep using the same
old binaries wrt. Ken Thompson attacks.

Ludo’.