`Scheme-only' bootstrap progress

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Hi!

I have just reset the wip-bootstrap branch on savannah with the first
functional version of the `Scheme-only' bootstrap.  Finishing this will
be the next milestone after the `Reduced Binary Seed' bootstrap that
removed binutils, gcc and glibc from the bootstrap binaries.

Now also bash, bzip2, coreutils, gawk, grep, gzip, patch, sed, tar, and
xz have been removed from the bootstrap binaries.  This again halves the
size of the bootstrap seed we need to build Guix, bringing it down to
60MB.

For a large part this has been made possible by the bootstrapping effort that
has been put into Gash by Timothy and myself, which now comes with minimal AWK
and SED implementations that are good enough to build the first packages.

Also, the Mes C Library now supports building (and correctly running :-)
early Awk, Bash, Sed and Tar, adding some 20 functions.

TODO

   * Remove Guile-2.2 dependency of Gash, revert bump of bootstrap-guile to 2.2
   * Create a one-file bootstrap Guile executable with bootstrap payload
   * Release Gash 0.1 (this needs some work 
https://gitlab.com/samplet/gash-roadmap)
   * Release Mes 0.20
   * Enhance Gash' AWK, SED and other coreutils so that we do not actually need 
to
     build the C tools during early bootstrap
   * Figure out a strategy for XZ: it won't build with tcc or even gcc-2.95.3,
     so it currently can be built only quite late in the bootstrap process
     when we have gcc-4.6.4
   * Cleanups, review, ...

Later

   * Get Mes bootstrapped from M2-Planet (exciting renewed progress here!)
   * Run Gash on Mes, remove bootstrap-guile
   * Run early Guix builds on Mes?
   * Remove bootstrap-mescc-tools binary seed, bootstrap from hex1
   * Remove bootstrap-mes binary seed, bootstrap from M2-Planet

Greetings,
janneke

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-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond http://lilypond.org
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