Re: Creating a reliable bootstrap for building from source

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 11:32:06PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
> For Guix developers, I think it???s reasonable to have a traditional GNU
> build system.  After all, Guix is also a regular software package that
> people can build from source with ???./configure && make && make install???.

This is the procedure I have now for creating a reliable bootstrap
from source:

The safest route is by using guix environment after starting
a clean shell

  screen -S guix-build # I tend to build in screen
  env -i /bin/bash --login --noprofile --norc
  ~/.guix-profile/bin/guix environment guix --ad-hoc help2man git strace \
    pkg-config less vim binutils coreutils grep --no-grafts
  bash # you may want this shell

In fact pick the most recent guix you have got, see 'ls
/gnu/store/*guix*/bin/guix' and run that command. Use the --no-grafts
switch if you have built packages that way before.

Note that you can start guix by installing the binary tar ball, or
copying it from another machine using the rather useful guix archive
or [[https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/creating-bundles-with-guix-pack.html][guix pack]] commands.

You may want to take a note of these running versions

  gcc --version
  guile --version

Next in the source tree

  rm -rf autom4te.cache/ # to be sure
  make clean
  ./bootstrap
  ./configure --localstatedir=/var
  make clean # to be really sure
  time make

It works reliably on all my setups :). Note that typically gcc is v4 or v5 and guile 2.0.x,
but never the same.

I am pleased with this until it stops working ... I think it should go in the manual and
we should have an automated test on this procedure.

Pj.
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