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Re: Removing compilers that cannot be bootstrapped


From: rain1
Subject: Re: Removing compilers that cannot be bootstrapped
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:43:30 +0000
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.0.6

On 2016-03-21 17:54, Thompson, David wrote:
Haskell, OCaml, Chicken, and other compilers that we package have a
serious issue that many of us are aware of: they cannot be built from
source!  They rely upon pre-built binaries of the same compiler.  I
understand that it's very inconvenient to not have these compilers
available to us, and all of the software that is written in their
respective languages, but I feel like all of our work is undermined by
making exceptions for them.  I would like to remove compilers that
don't have a bunch of dependent packages yet such as Chicken until
upstream fixes the issue.  But we have tons of Haskell packages and a
handful of OCaml packages and it would be heartbreaking to some to
remove all of that hard work.

What can we possibly do to avoid being yet another distro that relies
on a bunch of blobs (leaving the *true* bootstrap binaries out of it
for now)?

- Dave

I would like to propose one idea to manage this: What about adding a field to the system configuration for a list of 'trusted-binaries'?

guix requires gcc binaries (and some other things) to bootstrap off so these things are all implicitly trusted binaries. My suggestion is to make that list explicit and allow people to add things like the ocaml compiler to it.

Trying to install the ocaml compiler could give an error about an untrusted binary unless the user has added that to their system configuration.



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