Re: Preparing the reduced bootstrap tarballs

[Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>]

Hi Jan,

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> writes:

> 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.

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).

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.

> Greetings,
> janneke


-- Tim