Re: Preparing the reduced bootstrap tarballs

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> skribis:

>> 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.
>
> Okay, I am proposing the attached patches, also available on my 
> core-updates-next at http://gitlab.com/janneke/guix
>
> Still I hope these won't last for five more years ;-)

Well I hope these will last for at least a couple of years, or at least
this is what we should aim for.

Replacing bootstrap binaries is not anecdotal as I wrote because these
are “binary blobs” that need a special procedure to verify them; that
they are smaller blobs is of course a crucial improvement, but it
doesn’t change the fact that one may want to verify them.

> From 5702107a31f52a615c516084b7a82d9f5e2967e0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2018 19:29:55 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH 1/3] bootstrap: Add mescc-tools-static,
>  mescc-tools-static-tarball.
>
> * gnu/packages/make-bootstrap.scm (%mescc-tools-static,
> %mescc-tools-bootstrap-tarball):  New variable.

Neat; I’m glad it was as simple as this.  :-)

As discussed yesterday on IRC, please also make sure make-bootstrap.scm
does not refer to (gnu packages bootstrap) at all since that would be
like running in circles.

As discussed just now on IRC, we probably also need #:system
"i686-linux" in the appropriate places such that “guix build
bootstrap-tarballs” gives the same result on i686 and on x86_64.

> From cc3782c5f9d2c606a265be0dfdca44d79ec25622 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:30:00 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH 2/3] bootstrap: Add %bootstrap-mescc-tools.
>
> Built with
>     5702107a31f52a615c516084b7a82d9f5e2967e0 bootstrap: Add mescc-tools-static, mescc-tools-static-tarball.
>
> * gnu/packages/bootstrap.scm (%bootstrap-mescc-tools): New variable.

OK.

If you want, before pushing this patch, you can first push the one
above.  From there I (and possibly others!) will run “guix build
bootstrap-tarballs” and make sure we get the same result as you did.

> From daa9ff9463917687aabed8330eacb304a7e4deae Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2018 21:30:28 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH 3/3] bootstrap: Replace %mescc-tools-seed with
>  %bootstrap-mescc-tools.
>
> * gnu/packages/bootstrap.scm (%mescc-tools-seed): Remove.
> (%bootstrap-inputs): Replace %mescc-tools-seed with %bootstrap-mescc-tools.
> * gnu/packages/commencement.scm (mes-boot): Likewise.

Also: (mescc-tools-boot): Remove.

> (tcc-boot0): Likewise.
> (mescc-tools-boot): Remove.

I suppose this is not directly related to the other changes, but anyway,
LGTM.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Ludo’.