Hi Ludo,

On Sun, 03 May 2020 21:26:23 +0200
Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> I understand cross-base.scm is becoming messy and we would need an
> abstraction to facilitate its use.  Still, to me it sounds like a better
> option over big monolithic packages.
> 
> WDYT?

In general I'm all for using our cross toolchain mechanism.

However, this is the toolchain used by heads[1]--and they have reproducible
builds.

The use case is to be able to build heads in Guix without modification.

Their attestation of secure boot actually verifies (and asks the user and
documents the correct hashes in their README) whether the output hashes are
correct--so the toolchain doesn't need to be just similar, it needs to make
exactly the same executables.

Also, they are using musl instead of glibc.  I don't think we have a musl-gcc
yet and I've never done a musl gcc before.
Could be easy, could be hard--who knows.

That said, I'm all for it.

However, I need heads for work--and one way or another it has to actually
build the official version :)

[1] https://github.com/osresearch/heads/ , basically a Linux that goes on the
BIOS flash ROM.
[2] https://github.com/osresearch/heads/pull/710