Re: Preparing the reduced bootstrap tarballs

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Jeremiah@pdp10.guru skribis:

>> So if you like, please make that change.  There is only one little
>> thing: I have no (scripted) recipe to create mescc-tools-seed-XYZ.  But
>> wait: I have a great excuse for that...I was too lazy or too sloppy.
>
> I do, in mescc-tools-seed; the script bootstrap.sh when run with the
> option "sin" will build the mescc-tools-seed binaries using mescc-tools.
> The .M1 files are always generated by cc_x86.s using the C source files.

I saw this script but it’s not entirely clear to me how to package the
whole thing.  We don’t have a “stage0” package for instance in Guix, do
we?

>> WDYT?
> I think we will end up having several versions of mescc-tools-seed; as
> each architecture guix supports will end up needing a variant if we plan
> on keeping them small. (I also have no idea how to make a multi-arch fat
> elf binary)

For now let’s focus on x86_64/i686.  :-)

IMO we should change the seeds as rarely as possible because they are
managed “out-of-band” and verifying them is difficult (you need to fetch
the right Guix commit, run “guix build bootstrap-tarballs”, and compare
the result—assuming this is all bit-reproducible.)

The one we’re using today in Guix date back to 2013.

Thanks,
Ludo’.