I mean sure, you always need to start with a binary somewhere, but to put this into perspective... the binaries needed to bootstrap all the software on the dist

I mean sure, you always need to start with a binary somewhere, but to put this into perspective... the binaries needed to bootstrap all the software on the distro I run on my laptop weigh in at about 60 MiB[0]. An x86_64 build of Bazel alone weighs in at about 27 MiB[1]. As someone who cares about source bootstrappability, that feels like sliding backwards. I suppose you may be able to find a chain of older versions of Bazel starting with one that doesn't require Bazel itself to build, like the Guix devs did for Rust[2]. [0] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstrap-seed-to-25/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-bootstra... [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/tag/3.5.0 https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/releases/tag/3.5.0 [2] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2018/bootstrapping-rust/