Re: Core-updates merge

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Andreas,

On mar., 25 avril 2023 at 16:09, Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> wrote:


> I have just merged core-updates into master and deleted the branch!

Awesome!  Thank you for your patient leadership over the past months. :-)


> - R on powerpc64le needs to be built by changes to valgrind and lz4
>   (Simon Tournier, I).

Now, we are good, right?


> - There is still work to do to bootstrap GHC until the latest version on
>   i686, and to potentially shorten the bootstrap chain (Lars-Dominik Braun).

Argh, I will try to finish my patches soon.  I have:

 + turned off the test suite for ’ghc’ – it allows to not be blocked,
 + introduced ’ghc-testsuite’ to run the test suite,
 + introduced ’ghc-toolchain’ which depends on ’ghc’ and ’ghc-testsuite’
   – well, ’ghc’ being hidden.  Something similar as GCC.
 + shorten the chain as discussed elsewhere [1].

1: https://yhetil.org/guix/87r0siem5c.fsf@gmail.com


> - OCaml could be simplified by dropping version 4.07 (Julien Lepiller).

Well, 4.07 is the version that is de-bootstrapped, i.e. bootstrapped
using ’camlboot’ via Guile – for details see [2].

However, higher versions (4.09, 4.14, 5) does not use this seed and thus
they are not de-bootstrapped.  Well, I do not know the status upstream;
from my point of view, we have two options:

 a) Agree with other distros and OCaml folks to rely on a common OCaml
 4.07 bootstrapped using camlboot and then use this OCaml 4.07 as the
 seed for the subsequent versions.  Somehow having a way to verify the
 current OCaml compiler without running again and again via camlboot.

 b) Build ourselves a chain from 4.07 bootstrapped with camlboot to
 modern OCaml compilers.  However, each time we modify one dependency of
 camlboot, it means rebuild the complete chain.  Well, bootstrapping via
 camlboot can be very slow and I do not know if we have the resources
 for non-x86_64 architecture.  Here, the list of the emerged
 dependencies:

    $ guix graph camlboot -t bag-emerged | grep label | cut -d'=' -f2
     "camlboot@0.0.0-1.45045d0", shape 
     "guile@3.0.9", shape 
     "pkg-config@0.29.2", shape 
     "tar@1.34", shape 
     "gzip@1.12", shape 
     "bzip2@1.0.8", shape 
     "file@5.44", shape 
     "diffutils@3.8", shape 
     "patch@2.7.6", shape 
     "findutils@4.9.0", shape 
     "gawk@5.2.1", shape 
     "sed@4.8", shape 
     "grep@3.8", shape 
     "xz@5.2.8", shape 
     "coreutils@9.1", shape 
     "make@4.3", shape 
     "bash-minimal@5.1.16", shape 
     "ld-wrapper@0", shape 
     "binutils@2.38", shape 
     "gcc@11.3.0", shape 
     "glibc@2.35", shape 
     "glibc-utf8-locales@2.35", shape 
     "libffi@3.4.4", shape 
     "bash-minimal@5.1.16", shape 
     "libunistring@1.0", shape 
     "libgc@8.2.2", shape

 c) Fix the dependencies of camlboot.


Well, it seems a separated discussion but it echoes the recent blog post [3]
about “The Full-Source Bootstrap”. :-)

2: https://10years.guix.gnu.org/video/camlboot-debootstrapping-the-ocaml-compiler
3: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/


Cheers,
simon