Re: [gentoo-dev] remove system set?

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 11:13 PM, Doug Goldstein <cardoe@g.o> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 7:05 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> 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