3.1 The Mes Bootstrap Process

The Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap currently adopted by Guix¹³. In its intiial form it is only available for x86-linux and armhf-linux.

Currently, it goes like this:

                         gcc-mesboot (4.9.4)
                                ^
                                |
                        glibc-mesboot (2.16.0)
                                ^
                                |
                         gcc-mesboot1 (4.7.4)
                                ^
                                |
                        binutils-mesboot (2.20.1a)
                                ^
                                |
                         gcc-mesboot0 (2.95.3)
                                ^
                                |
                         glibc-mesboot0 (2.2.5)
                                ^
                                |
                        gcc-core-mesboot (2.95.3)
                                ^
                                |
    make-mesboot0, diffutils-mesboot, binutils-mesboot0 (2.20.1a)
                                ^
                                |
                            tcc-boot
                                ^
                                |
                            tcc-boot0
                                ^
                                |
                            mes-boot
                                ^
                                |
                                *
                     gash-boot, gash-utils-boot
                                ^
                                |
                                *
               bootstrap-mescc-tools, bootstrap-mes (~12 MiB)
                         bootstrap-guile (~48 MiB)

Here’s a generated dependency diagram to for the initial bootstrap gcc that builds the rest of Guix.

Work is ongoing to remove these binary seeds that were intentionally injected by our own doing as temporary shortcut

bootstrap-mescc-tools (seed), bootstrap-mes (seed)

For now, this additional non-bootstrapped dependencies (i.e., binary seeds) are taken for granted

bootstrap-guile

Our next priority is to eleminate these one by one.