This is incredible. To get the true bootstrappable gold star we will probably have to do some autoconf archaeology to regenerate those files, and clean up some of the fixpoints, but I did not expect to see so much progress in a single leap. However, I’m getting build failures trying to replicate it locally: Build failures preparing ghc 6.2.2 source · Issue #1 · andreabedini/ghc-bootstrap · GitHub

This is incredible. To get the true bootstrappable gold star we will probably have to do some autoconf archaeology to regenerate those files, and clean up some of the fixpoints, but I did not expect to see so much progress in a single leap. However, I’m getting build failures trying to replicate it locally: Build failures preparing ghc 6.2.2 source · Issue #1 · andreabedini/ghc-bootstrap · GitHub

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as 'FO [...]

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as 'FO [...]

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as 'FO [...]

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Debian AI GR; Python pathlib; bootstrappable builds; Fedora and AF_ALG; Arm 128-bit PTEs; BPF CI; 7.2 statistics. Briefs: Brief news items from…

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: * Front: Debian AI GR; Python pathlib; bootstrappable builds; Fedora and AF_ALG; Arm 128-bit PTEs; BPF CI; 7.2 statistics. * Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community. * Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in…

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds, which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN did look at the topic just over two years ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.

Debian is among the distributions with most supported CPU architectures and excellent cross-compilation support. We are working on improving its cross-building capabilities and keeping it easily cross-bootstrappable from source for upcoming CPU architectures. Therefore, we'll meet in an upcoming team sprint in Würzburg, Germany. See https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2025/BootstrapCrossbuild .

BUSY is a lean, statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system for GCC, CLANG and MSVC inspired by Google GN - rochus-keller/BUSY