2 ms·

Is Guix full-source bootstrap a lie?

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  First, feels a little clickbaity to have that title when the first line is > No, it is not a lie! But at least it's the first line... though of course that's after you've clicked, so I'd still say clickbait. Anyways. I wonder how hard it is to independently run this bootstrap without having guix in the first place? If I really wanted to prove that all of this was clean, I think I'd need to start from something else - maybe go write a tiny emulator on a commodore 64 that's just enough to run the bootstrap seed and write it to... maybe there's an adapter that would let a C64 write to an SD card, so you can plug that into an x86 machine to bootstrap from there? Because to avoid Trusting Trust, you'd have to start with a totally blank disk, right? I mean, I'm pretending the C64 is 100% perfectly trustworthy but I guess in theory you should be doing a nand2tetris type deal and building a machine out of actual discrete transistors. (And you'd have to trust the firmware the moment you got to a "real computer", of course, which is actually worse IMO...) (Of course, the real result is that I read that someone else, who I expect is trustworthy and smarter than me, has run this whole thing and it does in fact work and I can just consume the result, but it's good that people are independently verifying as well)