Crystal Bootstrapping Journey

[jgart]

Hi Guix,

We've (Ryan, David, Raghav, and others) started packaging crystal for guix: 
https://crystal-lang.org/

See 49142 and 49158 in the issue tracker.

Here are some notes, questions, and a list of dependencies regarding what is 
needed to finish a properly bootstraped crystal package:

https://github.com/ryanprior/guix-packages/blob/master/testing/crystal.org

We are trying to recreate this bootstrapping process:

https://github.com/crystal-lang/bootstrap-script

There are 160 stages!

A few questions extracted from the notes follow:

Is it preferable to have 160 bootstrap packages, one for each stage, or one big 
bootstrap package with 160 build-* stages, or somewhere inbetween?

Each stage needs a different checkout of the git repository - can we preserve 
info in .git such that we can checkout again during the build, or do we want to 
have each checkout be an independent input to the package?

How best can we use Guile macros to clean up the large amount of code implied 
by executing 160 stages of bootstrap logic?

best regards,

jgart

ps If you'd like to discuss more and help us in this effort reply here and/or 
come join us this Saturday for another guix packaging meetup:

https://events.nixnet.services/events/11610807-dd89-47e7-bd6c-64429e48e338