Re: Creating a reliable bootstrap for building from source

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 11:32:06PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
> 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.

Sure. But from my previous E-mail you can see we are effectively using
pull to bootstrap the source tree build.

> 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 point is that we can simplify. I like simple. Simple is good.

We can have both the configure and a simple Makefile.guix option. That
is what I do with my projects.

We do not need bootstrap, autoconf and configure on a running Guix
system. We do need it for other distributions.

Anyway, feel free to ignore this idea.

Pj.
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