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Christine Lemmer-Webber

Guix (and Mes) have achieved a FULL source bootstrap! This is INCREDIBLE STUFF! guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-ful

> We are delighted and somewhat relieved to announce that the third reduction of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been merged in the main branch of Guix! If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program—something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix.
>
> We refer to this as the Full-Source Bootstrap.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

28 comments
Arne Babenhauserheide
(mapcar #'emacsomancer objs)
mcc

@cwebber geez. And that's a verifiably reproducible build even, isn't it?

  Christine Lemmer-Webber

@mcc yup. it's reproducible++. We finally have an operating-system wide path out from the famous Thompson "trusting trust" attack!

  Christine Lemmer-Webber

@mcc Guix is the best thing to run on your computer basically

  mcc

@cwebber well, i'm probably installing a desktop linux distro in the near future, so i'll probably give you a chance to sell me on this sometime soon D:

  Dieu

@cwebber @mcc every once in a while consider switching from Nixos, but I don't know how how software availability compares, and community support. I have no doubt that guile is more attractive than nix-the-language, but don't know whether it's actually worth the extra effort.

  mcc

@cwebber OK and just checking, which hash algorithm(s) would need to go soft before you need to rebuild the hash tree there

  Raito Bezarius

@cwebber @mcc time to focus on the kernel bootstrap now :P

  Vagrant Cascadian

@cwebber @mcc

Well, at best I have seen #guix at about 86% #reproducible ...

data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1

Today, it is about 92% unknown... the two build farms have a fair amount of catching up to do after the core-updates merge.

"guix" itself is not particularly reproducible, due to non-determinism with parallelism in guile. Parallelism in the Debian package of guix is disabled so is reproducible there, at least!

Would be good to see how much of the #bootstrap is bit-for-bit reproducible!

@cwebber @mcc

Well, at best I have seen #guix at about 86% #reproducible ...

data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1

Today, it is about 92% unknown... the two build farms have a fair amount of catching up to do after the core-updates merge.

Henry Edward Hardy
xmoo
@cwebber That is honestly impressive! Congratulations to the Guix team!
lord pthenq1

@cwebber
What is guix?
The website is so technical that i cannot say by reading it

  nix

@pthenq1 @cwebber

Guix is the name of a package manager (GNU Guix) and a Linux distribution (GNU Guix System) that is designed around a few very specific goals but two of the big ones are: use only fully FOSS software, nothing proprietary; and use a functional package management system, which means packages are managed in a way that makes the result predictable and reproducible, and undoable (rollbacks).

  Dieu

@pthenq1 @cwebber a Nixos-like operating system that is programmed/configured using Guile.

Benjamin Kwiecień 🇵🇸
vx. kit redgrave ✅🍬
aeva

@cwebber Now all you need to do is build your own FPGA from 357 transistors and then not only will your system be immaculate all the way up, it'll also be immaculate all the way down

  mcc
  aeva
  mym

@aeva @mcc @cwebber i am honestly amazed a search for "open hardware silicon etching" did not bring up any pie in the sky hackerspace projects

  aeva

@mym @mcc @cwebber they exist. every now and then people rediscover the lost art of making one (1) transistor from scratch

  mcc

@aeva @mym @cwebber I keep thinking given its historical obsession with economic/cultural self-sufficiency, it ought to be possible to get Canada to fund the invention and/or build-out of processes for small-batch local ic fab

  aeva

@mcc @mym @cwebber one transistor may be modest start, but if you can secure stable funding for your lab you might find yourself with many moore of them.

  mcc

@aeva @mym @cwebber *we* *must* *convert* *Canada* *to* *Computronium*

  Ramin Honary

@aeva @cwebber
Sorry, I just have to ask you, why specifically the number 357 transistors? Is this like the smallest know number of transistors required to implement a lambda machine in hardware?

EDIT: oh I just got it! You mean an individually packaged NPN transistor, model number 357! You could build a lambda machine out of those, you could even make it useful if you provided it enough memory!

EDIT2: OH SHIT!!!! The root program of the Guix bootstrap is 357 bytes!!! Same model number for a NPN transistor. This can NOT be a coincidence.

357 is God's number!!! Mind blown. This is like, something out of the movie "Pi", I need a drill purge this shit from my brain!!!

@aeva @cwebber
Sorry, I just have to ask you, why specifically the number 357 transistors? Is this like the smallest know number of transistors required to implement a lambda machine in hardware?

EDIT: oh I just got it! You mean an individually packaged NPN transistor, model number 357! You could build a lambda machine out of those, you could even make it useful if you provided it enough memory!

Raito Bezarius
Michelle Hughes

@cwebber

What about a bootloader that starts and then kicks off the build, so you don't even need an OS to do the compiling on.

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