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Top-level
 Your mail about /bin/sh also raises an interesting topic of paths. Do you want to change /dev/null and /servers/exec to some other (hash-derived I would imagine) paths? Sounds wild but you totally could! You could then either patch glibc (and everyone who expects to find /dev/null at its usual place), or provide symlinks. But then again I don't know enough about Guix to judge here. 6 comments
> Also, one could argue that things like /dev/null have a well-defined interface that’s set in stone and that, consequently, how they’re implemented does not matter at all. Yes, but also no: there certainly can be differences in behavior that are allowed by the interface (where it explicitly doesn't guarantee something), but (due to bugs) can influence the outcome. For instance, does every write to /dev/null always write the whole buffer, or can there be short writes? Or: can a signal interrupt a write to /dev/null? (On SerenityOS the answer used to be no, on the Hurd it's a resounding yes, dunno about Linux.) See https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/issues/797 for how this can break things  @bugaevc Exactly! So the question becomes: assuming you have nothing but the Mach syscalls at your disposal, what chain of programs building on each other would eventually let you run a proc and an exec server so you have the beginning of a POSIX build environment? The whole stage0/M2/Mes story on Linux was quite a puzzle; its Hurd version would push it further. :-) @bugaevc The Hurd code lives in /gnu/store/…-hurd-*, but the translation points in the build environment would remain /dev/* and /servers/*. Changing that would be impractical and bring nothing. |
Gregory's Server
@civodul
Unfortunately all this wouldn't help you too much with bootstrapping from source, since you cannot do I/O easily on the Hurd like you can on Linux with a few instructions; you need to do RPCs and all that (even to get your argv). This is of course hidden from you when you're using glibc.
@janneke