Subject: bug#46537: ‘uname -s’ from Gash-Utils-Boot returns nothing

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2021 13:02:55 -0500

Hey,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Timothy Sample <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> [...] Gzip saves writing “(delete 'compress-documentation)” over and
>> over).
>
> We should add a pure Scheme gzip implementation, for instance using the
> R6RS zlib implementation by Göran Weinholt in Industria.

Bootar is already using that.  The problem with the Industria version is
that it only does decompression.  Fortunately, there’s an easy out here.
Gzip supports an uncompressed mode, so it would take only an hour or so
to write a “compressor” that just copies the data into Gzip format with
no compression.  (I’m hoping that XZ can do something similar so that
applying patches in “origin” records does not need to depend on the XZ
we use to unpack Guile.  Alternatively, we could add an option to
compress the patched sources with Gzip.)

>> Unfortunately, building Glibc after that is quite difficult.  To do it
>> with Gash-Utils, we would need (at least) to support redirects in AWK
>> and the “-t” and “-k” flags in sort.  For fun, I tried building Gawk
>> and Coreutils at this point (using the ancient versions that we
>> bootstrap with now).  That let me build Glibc, but then I hit a
>> problem with the “po2test.sed” script while building “gcc-mesboot”.  I
>> tried again with ancient GNU Sed, but the build seemed to hang during
>> a configure test.  I suspect adding Bash to the mix might fix it, but
>> I haven’t tried yet....
>
> Heheh, nice!  Anyhow, that looks like a promising path to me.
>
>> Back to the matter at hand: I’m closing this bug since it’s already been
>> fixed.  :)
>
> Thanks!  Any plan for a release?  We could upgrade the package in
> ‘core-updates’.

I’ve been holding on to “gcc-mesboot” as the milestone that would
warrant a release.  On the other hand, I could try and reify the
progress so far into an improved “commencement.scm” that still uses some
old GNU utilities to build the last “mesboot” version of Glibc.  Either
way, it will take some time since (as you know) my attention is on
Disarchive right now.  :)

-- Tim