On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:13 PM, Doug Goldstein <car...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:05 AM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote:
[snip] >> >> It is only useful for situations where people want to do something >> unusual. Some would argue that this is the only situation where >> Gentoo is useful. If I wanted a system just like everybody else's I >> guess I'd run Ubuntu, if not Windows or OSX. >> >> In any case, I do agree that getting there is associated with pain. I >> just like to think that getting there "someday" would be nice. I know >> that a systematic effort exists in mathematics to try to reduce all of >> math to a minimum set of axioms and have everything else be formally >> derived. I consider that a thing of beauty, even if I don't care to >> read the two volumes necessary to get to 1+1=2. >> >> Rich >> > > The other point of the system set is to get rid of the chicken and egg > problem. For example, virtually every package in the system set ships > as a tar, including tar itself. All the compression utilities ship as > tars, which need to be installed to build tar (think -z, -j, -J). You > need a standard C library to run virtually everything including tar, > which you need to extract your standard C sources. The list goes on. Bootstrapping is an inherently curious problem. Most systems are built upon the systems they themselves build, but getting to that self-hosting state always requires some unclean solution. (E.g. the first C compiler couldn't have been written in C. The first x86 assembler wouldn't have been written in x86 assembler. Etc.) Ideally, you'd want as narrow a bootstrapping channel as possible. Assuming things start off statically linked, what's the sequence for going from an empty chroot to stage 1, 2, 3...? What are the starting conditions? -- :wq
