Hi! I'm playing around with the bootstrapping of Guix. I figured out that at the very beginning executables for bash, mkdir, xz, tar, get downloaded into the store, which is done by some Guile, I think it is (default-guile). Then a guile-*.tar.xz file is downloaded and extracted into the store by a crafted shell script using the former bash as shebang and the other executables for creation of the directory in the store and extraction. This way we get the %bootstrap-guile and this is all in (gnu packages bootstrap).
Then the story continues in (gnu packages commencement), which uses %bootstrap-guile to build bootar, gash-boot, gash-utils-boot and stage0-posix. The surprising part is that stage0-posix contains a kaem-optional-seed per architecture, which is a minimal shell implementation as another binary executable! So up to this point these seven binary blobs are needed: (default-guile), bash, mkdir, xz, tar, %bootstrap-guile, kaem-optional-seed. And up to this point three shell implementations are in use: bash, gash, kaem-optional-seed. While playing around with all this I found a possibility to avoid five of these binary blobs, but it comes at the cost of using (default-guile) twice on the build-side. • Build bootar-dirty with (default-guile), make use of #:allowed-references (list (default-guile) "out"). • Build %bootstrap-guile with (default-guile) and bootar-dirty, make use of #:allowed-references '(). • Build another bootar with %bootstrap-guile, make use of #:allowed-references (list %bootstrap-guile "out"). From here on only %bootstrap-guile and bootar will be used. • Build gash-boot. • Build gash-utils-boot. • Build STAGE0-POSIX-bootstrap, but deleting kaem-optional-seed and using gash-boot instead. So at the cost of using (default-guile) twice on the build-side, the only remaining binary blobs are (default-guile) and guile-*.tar.xz. The only shell implementation in use is gash. Is this a possible and welcome alternative? What are the implications of using (default-guile) on the build side? Is this a bad idea? Won't it (or some other Guile) be used anyway in future, if the guix-daemon is rewritten in Guile? Is there a better Guile than (default-guile) to use? Which is the Guile used by Guix itself? Finally, I'm not clear about the advantage of trusting %bootstrap-guile alongside (default-guile). Why should it be better to trust both than only one of them? Well, the hash of %bootstrap-guile is checked. But it is checked by (default-guile). Bye Stefan
