We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.22, representing 57 commits over 8 weeks.
Mes can now be built reproducibly by mes+mescc or guile+mescc across distributions such as GNU Guix, Debian GNU/Linux and NixOS. Also, many build issues were fixed. A big thank you to reproducible-builds.org, Vagrant Cascadian, Jelle van der Waa, Hannes Mehnert and David Terry!
Mes now runs on the Hurd--mescc does not run yet, many system calls are missing, especially fork/exec--and initial scaffolding support for creating FreeBSD binaries was added.
This release better supports bringing the Scheme-only bootstrap to Guix: it no longer requires an update to the Guix bootstrap seed.
The Scheme-only bootstrap means that Mes can now be built with Gash and the experimental Gash Core Utils instead of using GNU Awk, GNU Bash, the GNU Core Utilities, GNU Grep, GNU Gzip, GNU Make, GNU Sed, and GNU Tar. Also, the Mes C Library now supports bootstrapping those.
We are excited that the Nlnet Foundation is now sponsoring this work!
Next targets:
- Introduce the Reduced Binaries Seed bootstrap to NixOS (Debian, Arch, Gentoo, ...?)
- Merge the Scheme-only bootstrap, the wip-bootstrap branch (using Guile, Gash and Gash Core Utils to remove awk, bash, core utilities, grep, gzip, make, sed, tar, etc. from the Guix bootstrap binaries) into Guix core-updates.
- ARM support
- Full Source Bootstrap: compile Mes.c using M2-Planet
- Add full Guile module support
- Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for ARM
- Support mescc on the Hurd (fork/exec, ...)
Packages are available in Guix master; the cross-distro reproducible is built using
guix build --system=i686-linux mes-rb5About
GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the GNU System. Since version 0.22 it has again helped to halve the size of opaque, uninspectable binary seeds that are currently being used in the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap of GNU Guix. The final goal is to help create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds effort for UNIX-like operating systems.
The Scheme interpreter is written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C, and the C compiler written in Scheme and these are mutual self-hosting. This mes.c is being simplified to be transpiled by M2-Planet.
Mes has a Garbage Collector, a library of loadable Scheme modules– notably Dominique Boucher's LALR, Pre-R6RS portable syntax-case with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's Nyacc –and test suite, just enough to support a REPL and a C99 compiler: mescc.
Mes+MesCC can compile an only lightly patched TinyCC that is self-hosting. Using this tcc and the Mes C library we now have a Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for the gnutools triplet: glibc-2.2.5, binutils-2.20.1, gcc-2.95.3. This is enough to bootstrap Guix for i686-linux and x86_64-linux.
Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5 – John McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and Jeremiah Orians's stage0 ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler.
GNU Mes is free software, it is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 or later. See the file COPYING.
Download
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.git
Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz.sig
Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:
450c3043ad68ce942c1233282c9fa7e7 mes-0.22.tar.gz
a318150059a2bcff6b58e765e203c05d0dfaccee mes-0.22.tar.gz[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify mes-0.22.tar.gz.sigIf that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
Get informed, get involved
See https://bootstrappable.org
Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.
Changes in 0.22 since 0.21
Core
Mes now builds reproducibly with MesCC, cross distribution Using --with-bootstrap on x86, a bin/mes-mescc is compiled with mes+mescc, that shall have sha256sum
722790ed261954eb53cf2cd2906c89c7589ef72b66171bbe2a9dce0f0af20232 bin/mes-mescc v0.22 9e0bcb1633c58e7bc415f6ea27cee7951d6b0658e13cdc147e992b31a14625fb bin/mes-mescc v0.21
only differing in the version number string.
This has been verified on GNU Guix, Debian GNU/Linux and NixOS.
Mes now builds reproducibly with Guile+MesCC vs Mes+MesCC.
Mes now builds reproducibly with Tiny CC-built MesCC.
configure now respects the user's CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
Mes now supports mescc-tools 0.5.2 next to 0.6.1. This allows introducing the Scheme-only bootstrap without updating or adding new bootstrap binary seeds into GNU Guix.
Mes now runs when configured --with-courage on the Hurd: GNU debian 0.9 GNU-Mach 1.8+git20170609-486/Hurd-0.9 i686-AT386 GNU Note that mescc does not run; fork and exec are not yet implemented.
Mes now configures --with-courage on x86-FreeBSD 12.1 The initial ELF scaffold tests: exit-42.S, 0exit-42.hex2, body-exit-42.hex2, hello-mes.S, 0hello-mes.hex2, body-hello-mes.hex2 pass.
configure now has a --with-bootstrap option. This adds the reproducible bootstrap build of bin/mes-mescc, using mes+mescc.
configure prefers $CC over gcc; tcc over gcc, gcc over cc.
Mes now prints an error when attempting to read a file that does not exist.
Mes no longer depends on GIT.
Noteworthy bug fixes
Several annoying build problems were fixed, for non-Guix systems.
A bug with buffered-read was fixed. This means that bash-2.05 can now build glibc-2.2.5; notably it now successfully executes make-syscall.sh.
A bug with execlp, execvp for file names containing a slash was fixed. This should allow make-3.80 running scripts that have "#! ./move-if-change".
Greetings, janneke and Danny.