From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rain1@openmailbox.org Subject: Re: Removing compilers that cannot be bootstrapped Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:43:30 +0000 Message-ID: <61b3756456285d436389fbf9e5ec61f1@openmailbox.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:38775) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ai8Xx-0006tx-Tz for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Mar 2016 18:43:38 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ai8Xs-0006RA-NF for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Mar 2016 18:43:37 -0400 Received: from mail2.openmailbox.org ([62.4.1.33]:42992) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ai8Xs-0006R4-EW for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 21 Mar 2016 18:43:32 -0400 Received: from www.openmailbox.org (openmailbox-b1 [10.91.69.218]) by mail2.openmailbox.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C1A072AD0B9E for ; Mon, 21 Mar 2016 23:43:30 +0100 (CET) In-Reply-To: List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: guix-devel@gnu.org On 2016-03-21 17:54, Thompson, David wrote: > Haskell, OCaml, Chicken, and other compilers that we package have a > serious issue that many of us are aware of: they cannot be built from > source! They rely upon pre-built binaries of the same compiler. I > understand that it's very inconvenient to not have these compilers > available to us, and all of the software that is written in their > respective languages, but I feel like all of our work is undermined by > making exceptions for them. I would like to remove compilers that > don't have a bunch of dependent packages yet such as Chicken until > upstream fixes the issue. But we have tons of Haskell packages and a > handful of OCaml packages and it would be heartbreaking to some to > remove all of that hard work. > > What can we possibly do to avoid being yet another distro that relies > on a bunch of blobs (leaving the *true* bootstrap binaries out of it > for now)? > > - Dave I would like to propose one idea to manage this: What about adding a field to the system configuration for a list of 'trusted-binaries'? guix requires gcc binaries (and some other things) to bootstrap off so these things are all implicitly trusted binaries. My suggestion is to make that list explicit and allow people to add things like the ocaml compiler to it. Trying to install the ocaml compiler could give an error about an untrusted binary unless the user has added that to their system configuration.