[GSoC] Bourne-shell compiler front-end for Guile

[Efraim Flashner]

I'm a student still this year and Guix is the only project I'm considering.

If there's anything I can do/change to make it more clear or thorough I'd
love to have some feedback.

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Efraim Flashner   <efr...@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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Write a Bourne-shell compiler front-end for Guile

Efraim Flashner
efr...@flashner.co.il

Who am I?

My name is Efraim, I’m currently living in Jerusalem, Israel. I’m a 3rd 
year Computer Science student at the Jerusalem College of Technology (Israel 
has the college/university split). One of my classes was on functional 
programming, where we covered prolog and lisp. I found the idea of functional 
programming interesting, and at the time even tried writing small programs 
using them.

I switched full-time to Linux in 2010, trying out Ubuntu and then switching to 
Debian, and currently I’m waiting on a blob-free wireless mini-pcie/usb 
before switching my laptop over to GuixSD. I haven’t had a lot of opportunity 
in Israel to meet up with Free Software or Linux people, and I’ve worked hard 
to make up for that by reading lots of online tutorials and experimenting on my 
machines. I first discovered Guix around June of last year and got involved 
shortly after.

The Plan:

As it currently stands, looking in gnu/packages/bootstrap/$ARCH/, in addition 
to guile there’s bash, mkdir, tar and xz. From the manual we have the 
bootstrapping methodology 
(https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Bootstrapping.html) which 
also uses gcc, binutils, coreutils, libc, etc. We also have 
guix/build/bournish.scm to act as a rescue-shell of sorts and in use in the 
initrd.

By extending/building upon bournish we can lessen the number of bootstrap 
binaries that we need to bootstrap a working system AND we get a more powerful 
shell to use when something™ happens during boot and we’re dropped down to 
a rescue shell.

Currently the idea on the GSoC idea wiki is to extend bournish so that it can 
cover everything needed by a configure script. This would of course allow us to 
decrease the number of binaries we need to get started. Looking at the list of 
bootstrap binaries, I’m most interested in including enough functionality to 
remove our dependance on bash which to me seems like a good security idea, as 
surely we wouldn’t want to have a vulnerability found for our bootstrap 
version of bash.

The Plan, Part 2:

From now until the start of GSoC I’d work on bettering my knowledge of guile 
and more closely analyzing the bootstrap process. I’ve had a look at 
Wikipedia’s entry on Unix shells and I’ll be grabbing the source of a few 
of them, including ash, scsh and busybox, for inspiration.

For the coding I plan on implementing the different features that we’d need 
for replacing a number of the bootstrap binaries. As a stretch-goal I’d like 
to see if it is possible to switch to using it as my user shell in place of 
bash. Part of this would of course come with deciding on how to use it to 
replace bootstrap binaries; whether to have additional binary outputs for the 
different binaries being replaced or to have one monolithic binary.

GSoC_proposal_Efraim_Flashner.pdf
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