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

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>]

Timothy Sample writes:

> Here’s an update about bootstrapping for you.

Yay!

> 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.

On my--because of this great merger--already bitrotten wip-bootstrap
branch, I managed to build make using the earlier Gash (without bash or
any bootstrap binaries except xz or bootstrap-guile).

So my hope for the Scheme-only bootstrap is work up to a gash 0.1 and
then build make, patch (awk?), gzip and possibly xz.

At the R-B summit we have expressed the wish to create a single-binary
fat bootstrap Guile, probably coming with Gash.  Great possibilities
ahead!

> 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.)

...yes.

> 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.

That's another option too.  I still hope that with `make' built, gash
will be able to build patch.

> 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.

I think we should really rename our `geesh' archives to gash, and try to
define a 0.1 target -- WDYT?

Thanks for your amazing work!
janneke

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
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