Guix Day: Notes frome the Bootstrap session

Guix Day: Notes frome the Bootstrap session

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Hello Guix!

Attached the notes from the "Bootstrap what's next" session yesterday.

Greetings,
Janneke

- Branch wip-arm-bootstrap is getting ready but stuck at glibc-mesboot0,
  when finished: release mes-0.23.

- Branch wip-full-source-bootstrap is ready for review; wait with merge
  until wip-arm-bootstrap?  When finished, relase mes-0.24.

- Support for PowerPC and RISC-V

- Submitting a GSOC proposal to have a student help out with some of the
  problems ^^

- Building for PowerPC isn't straightforward. You'd need actual h/w to
  test things out.

- Making the guix build system code less dependent on Guile and more
  dependent on MES

- PowerPC
 + Glibc+GCC version combination during bootstrap is problematic on PowerPC.
 + Glibc changes introduces uncertainty.
 + Branch with bootstrap binaries is ready for merging:
   https://git.sr.ht/~lle-bout/guix/log/wip-ppc64le

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
Freelance IT http://JoyofSource.com | Avatar® http://AvatarAcademy.com

Re: Guix Day: Notes frome the Bootstrap session

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> skribis:

> Attached the notes from the "Bootstrap what's next" session yesterday.

Thanks for sharing!

> - Making the guix build system code less dependent on Guile and more
>   dependent on MES

Not necessarily more dependent on Mes :-), but rather portable between
the two.

On this topic, one action item we identified was to try and see what it
would take to run (guix build gnu-build-system) and the modules it
depends on on Mes.  If we can run that on Mes during early bootstrap
(before Guile is built), then that’s a step towards removing the big
‘%bootstrap-guile’ binary seed.

These modules require some Guilish module support as well as a bunch of
(ice-9 *) and (srfi *) modules.  Perhaps with some tricks such as
autoloads, we can reduce the number of modules actually needed.

Another option is to write a simplified but compatible subset of (guix
build gnu-build-system) specifically for use during early bootstrap.

At any rate, the first step is to try to feed that code to Mes and see
what happens.  :-)

If you’ve always wanted to join the bootstrapping movement, now’s your
opportunity!

Ludo’.

Re: Guix Day: Notes frome the Bootstrap session

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Ludovic Courtès writes:

Hello,
>
> Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> skribis:
>
>> Attached the notes from the "Bootstrap what's next" session yesterday.
>
> Thanks for sharing!
>
>> - Making the guix build system code less dependent on Guile and more
>>   dependent on MES
>
> Not necessarily more dependent on Mes :-), but rather portable between
> the two.

Ah, sure -- my bad for simply forwarding the notes without really
reading them, only adding the status update :-/

> On this topic, one action item we identified was to try and see what it
> would take to run (guix build gnu-build-system) and the modules it
> depends on on Mes.  If we can run that on Mes during early bootstrap
> (before Guile is built), then that’s a step towards removing the big
> ‘%bootstrap-guile’ binary seed.
>
> These modules require some Guilish module support as well as a bunch of
> (ice-9 *) and (srfi *) modules.  Perhaps with some tricks such as
> autoloads, we can reduce the number of modules actually needed.
>
> Another option is to write a simplified but compatible subset of (guix
> build gnu-build-system) specifically for use during early bootstrap.
>
> At any rate, the first step is to try to feed that code to Mes and see
> what happens.  :-)
>
> If you’ve always wanted to join the bootstrapping movement, now’s your
> opportunity!

Yes, very nice!  Note that we already have some experience with this:
the Nyacc project is a Guile library that runs on Mes; only minor
modifications were necesary.

Greetings,
Janneke

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
Freelance IT http://JoyofSource.com | Avatar® http://AvatarAcademy.com