unofficial mirror of help-guix@gnu.org 
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* bootstrapping scenario for a package
@ 2021-12-20  7:03 Andy Tai
  2021-12-21 14:11 ` Efraim Flashner
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Andy Tai @ 2021-12-20  7:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: help-guix

Hi, I was trying to update mono to the current release version.  The
build step as documented actually says to download a minimal C#
compiler from the mono site which is then used to compile the rest of
the source to build the full system.   I looked and did not find the
source of this minimal compiler--so it is a black box in a way.

In free software it is ideal to build everything from source.   I
wonder how is such a package handled in Guix?   What is the strategy
for bootstrapping?   Thanks


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

* Re: bootstrapping scenario for a package
  2021-12-20  7:03 bootstrapping scenario for a package Andy Tai
@ 2021-12-21 14:11 ` Efraim Flashner
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Efraim Flashner @ 2021-12-21 14:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Andy Tai; +Cc: help-guix

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1522 bytes --]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 11:03:25PM -0800, Andy Tai wrote:
> Hi, I was trying to update mono to the current release version.  The
> build step as documented actually says to download a minimal C#
> compiler from the mono site which is then used to compile the rest of
> the source to build the full system.   I looked and did not find the
> source of this minimal compiler--so it is a black box in a way.
> 
> In free software it is ideal to build everything from source.   I
> wonder how is such a package handled in Guix?   What is the strategy
> for bootstrapping?   Thanks

For circular dependencies our first attempt is to use a minimal variant
of the package that's missing features to build the full package. For
something like a language that depends on a working implementation of
itself we'll see if we can bootstrap it using either a previous version
of itself, a different implementation or a slimmed down version that has
enough working to be able to build itself.

Some notable examples are rust, bootstrapped from mrustc, and a chain of
rust compilers. Also go, bootstrapped from gccgo or go-1.4 (written in
C). One where this fails is GHC, where even going back to the early 90's
it was near impossible to find an implementation that didn't depend on a
previous version.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
GPG key = A28B F40C 3E55 1372 662D  14F7 41AA E7DC CA3D 8351
Confidentiality cannot be guaranteed on emails sent or received unencrypted

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-12-21 14:15 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-12-20  7:03 bootstrapping scenario for a package Andy Tai
2021-12-21 14:11 ` Efraim Flashner

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).