Hi Ludo,

(CC’ing Jan and bug#38390.)

We’re nearing a release for Gash-Utils, and while working on it I made
some changes to how the bootstrap Gash and Gash-Utils are built (on the
wip-bootstrap branch.)  Jan suggested that we get your opinion on the
changes, as you are behind the current '%bootstrap-guile+guild'
approach.

The very short story is that I found that the Scheme GZip code is being
maintained and works out-of-the-box on Guile 2.0.9 [1].  This made me
unsure about copying the code into Gash-Utils when maybe we could just
use it as a dependency.  Then, I realized that the library included a
simple Tar reader, and wondered how simple a program could be that could
handle 'tar xvf gash.tar.gz'.  It turns out pretty simple!  So I put the
program and all its dependencies in an a-list with a little loop that
writes them to disk, and made a self-extracting Scheme script that can
unpack compressed tarballs [2].

[1] https://github.com/weinholt/compression
[2] https://git.ngyro.com/bootar/

The other thing is that I always intended for Gash and Gash-Utils to be
built with a loop calling “compile-file”.  This avoids the need for
“guild” which in turn avoids “bash” (AIUI).

These patches update Gash-Utils, replace the binary “tar” with my
self-extracting Scheme implementation, and replace “guild” with
“compile-file”.  I think this simplifies the bootstrap processes, and I
really like getting rid of the references to “tar”, “bash”, and “xz”
(even though they are needed for the bootstrap Guile, it feels nice to
quarantine them there).

WDYT?


-- Tim