Re: Creating a reliable bootstrap for building from source

[Ludovic Courtès]

Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> skribis:

> The combination of 'guix pull' held a promise, were it not that pull is
> also iffy. Probably for pretty much the same reason.
>
> The bootstrap+configure scripts try to work that, but actually
> address a wider case. I.e. people who want to bootstrap in Debian etc.
> I don't think we need al that. I write Makefile.guix for my projects
> and they tend to be simple! Once you can assume Guix is there life
> gets simple as a developer - except when you try to bootstrap :0
>
> The instruction I would like to write for others is:
>
> 1. Install the latest bootstrap-guix-from-source package after a guix pull
> 2. git clone guix && cd guix
> 3. run make -f Makefile.guix  
>
> (no configure is needed in guix!)
>
> 4. ./pre-inst guix etc. etc.

I think there are two very different use cases.

As a user I want something like ‘apt-get update’, which is what ‘guix
pull’ tries to do.

For Guix developers, I think it’s reasonable to have a traditional GNU
build system.  After all, Guix is also a regular software package that
people can build from source with “./configure && make && make install”.

My 2¢,
Ludo’.