Re: [Tinycc-devel] [bootstrappable] Re: wip-full-source-bootstrap: from a 357-byte `hex0' to 'hello'

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

> Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> wrote:

Hello Arnold!

>> to the gawk-mesbot0 recipe also fixes "inc.awk".  The pre
>> increment/decrement code looks like this:
>>
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>>              *lhs = make_number(lval +
>>                             (tree->type == Node_preincrement ? 1.0 : -1.0));
>>
>> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> What in the world?  That looks like gawk 3.x code, which is
> terribly ancient.  What project is still using a version that old?

We are removing binary seeds from the GNU Guix package graph.  The
binary packages in Guix form an acyclic graph and at the bottom of the
graph we originally had binutils, glibc, gcc, bash, coreutils&co (gawk,
gzip, sed, tar, ...).

Since 2016 we have been working to eliminate those binary seeds.  For a
complete overview and more background see

    https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25/
    https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/

but what we did is remove all those, replacing them by Stage0, GNU Mes,
tinycc...and multiple versions of ancient GNU tools.

Using ancient tools is less than great, we are using those because "it
works" or rather, we didn't succeed as yet using newer versions.  Often,
newer versions of a software are more demanding in their requirements
and are less bootstrappale.  In other cases, ancient software does not
build with newer tools, because they are more strict.

> Arnold
> (The gawk maintainer)

Thanks for reaching out!

Sadly I do not have more concrete information (let alone a bug report or
feature request) for you yet, other than that we are using gawk-3.0.0,
lateron v3.1.8, and only finally v5.0.1.  Simalarly for other tools.

The biggest hudle was bootstrapping glibc and gcc, as you can imagine.
Currently, we start with gcc-2.95.3 and I would very much like to target
gcc-4.6.4 directly instead.  For a tool as gawk, it would be great to
be able to the latest greatest!

Greetings,
Janneke (GNU Mes author)

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