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Re: How to add /bin/sh to the build environment
From: |
Philip McGrath |
Subject: |
Re: How to add /bin/sh to the build environment |
Date: |
Mon, 8 Nov 2021 20:36:08 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.2.1 |
(I wrote my earlier reply before I saw Leo's.)
On 11/8/21 17:23, Leo Famulari wrote:
It will be necessary to fix this issue in the SML/NJ package definition
(I think you've done this in a followup patch)
Is this <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/38606>, or somewhere else?
Guix does not
accept packages that rely on pre-built binaries — everything must be
built from source code. There are some exceptions but I don't think that
SML/NJ will qualify due to its obscurity compared to other language
implementations. If SML/NJ cannot be built without the binary bootfiles,
it probably won't be eligible for inclusion in GNU Guix.
Mostly I wanted to follow up to say that, from my perspective, SML/NJ is
a very noteworthy and influential language implementation. Perhaps the
most familiar example for Guix folks would be that Guile's fibers are
based on Concurrent ML, which is an SML/NJ extension:
https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/29/a-new-concurrent-ml
Personally I've only read ML, not written it, but from a Debian bug I
found through searching online
(<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=220046>), it appears
that there are no known Standard ML implementations that avoid this
bootstrapping problem. SML/NJ, in addition to being one of the most
important implementations in its own right, is apparently capable of
bootstrapping at least one other implementation, MLton. (Unlike some on
that thread, I don't consider the 5x slowdown for the bootstrap build to
be prohibitive: bootstrapping Chez Scheme via Racket has a 10x slowdown.)
It is very valuable that Guix maintains such high standards for
bootstrapping from source. However, Guix does still contain some
compilers that have bootstrapping limitations. SML/NJ is no worse that
Chez Scheme in this respect, and comparably important. (One difference
is that there is a path to backporting the bootstrap simulation from
Racket's fork to the upstream variant, which would remove the
problem---but I don't that wasn't true when Chez Scheme was first added
to Guix.) The status quo is that no Standard ML language implementation
at all seems to be in Guix. I think including SML/NJ would be better
than waiting for someone to write a hypothetical Standard ML compiler in
a host language with a better bootstrapping story.
-Philip