Re: Blog post on the Full-Source Bootstrap

[Simon Tournier]

Hi Janneke,

On mer., 26 avril 2023 at 16:12, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> wrote:

>   
> https://gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/

Really cool!


Maybe I misread the wording:

        If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than
        22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program
or
        First, while the package graph is rooted in a 357-byte program,

Well, without being the accountant, considering the “more than 22,000
nodes”, the revision fa685c8 contains ~23,000 packages and more than
1700 packages depends on GHC (Haskell) which is not bootstrapped from
this 357-byte program, AFAIK.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix refresh -l ghc@9.2 | cut -f1 -d':'
Building the following 569 packages would ensure 1712 dependent packages are 
rebuilt
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Because Pandoc, it appears in many non-Haskell packages, here an example
about R and bioinformatics:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$ guix show r-catalyst | recsel -p synopsis
synopsis: Cytometry data analysis tools  

$ guix graph --path r-catalyst ghc@9.2 -t bag-emerged
r-catalyst@1.22.0
r-dplyr@1.1.1
r-pillar@1.9.0
r-utf8@1.2.3
r-rmarkdown@2.21
pandoc@2.19.2
ghc@9.2.5
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

In addition, that’s similar for ~450 packages relying on OCaml.

Bah, I am nitpicking.  Am I? :-)


What achievement this bootstrap story!  Thanks to all the people
involved.  Back on FOSDEM 2017, I remember “Mes -- Maxwell's Equations
of Software An attempt at dissolving bootstrap binaries” [1].  Thanks to
this talk, I had this kind of revelation:

        Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate
        school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on
        the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in
        itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”

                                                            – Alan Kay – 

Then, I got the point with Yogurt metaphor [2] on FOSDEM 2019.  Anyway!

Thank you.

Cheers,
simon

1: https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/guixsdbootstrap/
2: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/jan_janneke_nieuwenhuizen/