Jan Nieuwenhuizen

Last year (FOSDEM'20) GNU Mes helped create a second reduction by 50% of the Guix bootstrap binaries, to about ~60MiB; 25% of its original size. This year we have removed the binary seeds for MesCC-Tool and GNU Mes and replace them with Stage0 and M2-Planet: the Full Source Bootstrap!

Freedom of computing is what the free software movement is about, and it is becoming more important every day. Although "Open Source" has become quite popular, the underlying ideas of freedom and their importance are often overlooked or avoided. When we think about it, we know that we cannot expect to have free and democratic societies when the softwares we use are non-free and controlled by powerful "others".

Freedom of computing does not end with free software, that is where it starts. Whilst anyone may inspect the source code for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled with no method to confirm whether they correspond. The Reproducible Builds project aims to fix this by asserting that users should be given a way to recreate a close enough build environment, perform the build process, and validate that the output matches the original build. GNU Guix is a distribution that is being developed with such verification in mind and has it built-in.

However, Reproducible Builds are also, not enough. We are thrilled that NlNet has acknowledged this by funding our work through the NGI0 PET fund. To get freedom of computing, we need bootstrappable builds, starting from a minimal binary seed; preferrably a full source bootstrap.

Last year GNU Mes brought the Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap to GNU Guix: gcc, glibc and binutils were removed and the size of the bootstrap binaries went down from 250MB to 130MB. This year we introduce the Scheme-only bootstrap: Awk, Bash, Core Utilities, Grep, Gzip, Make, Sed, Tar are replaced by Gash and Gash Core Utils, halving the size of the Guix bootstrap seed again, to 60MB. Next up, the Full Source bootstrap!

Two years ago on FOSDEM'17 a minimalistic bootstrap was a dream; today it has started to become reality. Bootstrapping GNU/Linux without use of the GNU toolchain (gcc, binutils, glibc) was our first milestone that we just reached. Mes became a GNU project. We will talk about what bootstrapping is and why it is important.
We will show how Mes' minimalistic Scheme has made this possible and on future milestones (Scheme only bootstrap, other GNU/Linux distributions) before reaching the holy grail: a full source bootstrap.

Mes aims to create an entirely source-based bootstrapping path. The target is to [have GuixSD] bootstrap from a minimal, easily inspectable binary --that should be readable as source-- into something close to R6RS Scheme.

We will show the current state of Mes, some interesting things found on the path so far, and Q&A on `Why Scheme?' and its future.