Re: New Gash build Bash without Bash, Coreutils, and a few others

[Joshua Branson]

Timothy Sample <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Guix,
>
> Here’s an update about bootstrapping for you.

Way to go!  That's pretty awesome!

>
> I am very pleased to announce that Gash (having absorbed Geesh) is now
> capable of building Bash without Bash, Coreutils, Grep, Sed, or Tar.
> That is, Gash provides alternatives, written in Scheme, to all the
> utilities needed by the “gnu-build-system” that are normally provided by
> those packages.  Note, however, that this work is still very much at the
> “proof of concept” level.
>
> This is exciting because it means that we are within sight of removing
> each of those packages from the set of bootstrap binaries (in the
> context Jan’s work on MES and the Guix “reduced binary seed bootstrap”).
> AIUI, that means that, besides Guile and MES, the set of bootstrap
> binaries need only contain AWK, Patch, Bzip2, Gzip, and XZ.
>
> There is still a lot to do.  Concretely, Gash itself has to be
> bootstrapped.  There is some mildly bit-rotten code for this that will
> have to be revived.  Gash should also be ported to Guile 2.0, since that
> is the current bootstrap Guile, and it would be nice not to change it.
> (This shouldn’t be too hard.)
>
> As for the other utilities, I don’t really have a strategy for them.  I
> would imagine that writing a good-enough “patch.scm” would not be too
> hard.  AWK is difficult, but after spending (way too much) time reading
> “configure” scripts, I think it could be avoided.
>
> You can see the latest code at <https://gitlab.com/samplet/geesh> (yes,
> the URL needs an update).  The work described in this message is on the
> “wip-bootstrap” branch.
>
> -- Tim
>

-- 
Joshua Branson
Sent from Emacs and Gnus