Re: Preparing the reduced bootstrap tarballs

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>]

Timothy Sample writes:

Hello Timothy!

>> The plan is to have Guile and Gash initially replace all coreutils&co
>> and build them from source early in the bootstrap phase, right after
>> having built tcc and GNU make.  We have managed to build GNU make
>> without any dependency on any of the tool you mention (except for
>> Guile).
>>
>> We're not there yet, gash cannot build mes or tcc.  Also, the latest mes
>> 0.18 release cannot support buillding bash yet.  Lots of fun hacking
>> todo!
>
> I wanted to let you know that I’ve been doing more work on the little
> Shell backend that we were talking about earlier.  It’s kind of like the
> worse-is-better version of Gash: it is certainly not as nice, but the
> development pace is much faster.  I did take a look at just working on
> Gash directly, but it looked like it was going to be a lot slower.

Oh, that's great news!  We have been making good progress on Gash.  The
parser has been completely revamped.  The next target is to add a
transformation that should result in a eval'able shelly Guile script,
ideally something that you'd want to write by hand.

To achieve that will take some time.  It would be nice if we could work
together shaping this shelly script language .

If Gash and Geesh would produce (after transformation) the same shelly
script language, we can also share the backend implementation, WDYT?

> So, keeping in mind that software estimates are very unreliable, I would
> say that I might have a workable interpreter in the next week or two.
> There are three big features missing: globbing, asynchronous commands,
> and arithmetic substitutions.  I am almost finished globbing,
> asynchronous commands should be pretty easy, and I plan to leave
> arithmetic substitutions on the road-map for as long as possible (it’s a
> little bit boring).

Hehe.  I had a look and you did make lots of progress!

> After I get those first two features working, I am going to start
> testing running build scripts for Bash.  I will contact you then in case
> you have any new advice on which scripts are important or anything else.

Great,
Keep up the good work!

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
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