Bootstrapping on a new platform

[Paul Boddie <paul@boddie.org.uk>]

Hello,

I finally got round to trying to build Guix again, this time doing a native 
build rather than a cross-build. However, I'm attempting this on an 
unsupported platform (mipsel), and it isn't clear what I need to do to make 
the bootstrap binaries and thus attempt a source build.

What I've figured out so far is this:

tar zxf guix-0.13.0.tar.gz
cd guix-0.13.0
./bootstrap
./configure --with-courage
make
make install

This gets me the guix-daemon, but upon trying to do anything, I get the 
following:

guix build: error: could not find bootstrap binary 'tar' for system 'mipsel-
linux'

I understand that I need some bootstrap binaries, and the bootstrapping 
documentation indicates that these can indeed be generated as follows:

guix build --target=mipsel-linux-gnu bootstrap-tarballs

But this just gives the same error. And I am actually running on mipsel-linux-
gnu, so I suppose it might be different if I were try this on a supported 
system - i386-linux-gnu, for instance - and thus generate the binaries that 
way.

Maybe I have just missed the part of the manual that talks about these source 
builds, but it really doesn't seem obvious to me. Another thing, which I've 
seen mentioned on this list is reproducible builds. Might it be possible to 
have architecture-independent source archives that reproducibly build the 
binaries?

Sorry not to be able to figure this out for myself!

Paul