Subject: Re: self bootstrapping packages?
To: None <tech-pkg@NetBSD.org>
From: Alan Barrett <apb@cequrux.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 11/12/2007 10:17:20
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007, Jon Buller wrote:
> The only trouble was that SBCL needs a Common Lisp system to build itself.  

Is there any Common Lisp system written in C?  If so, could SBCL have a
BUILD_DEPENDS referring to it?

Similarly for lang/gcc*-ada: Is it possibly to set up a chain of depends
such that gcc-ada depends on an older version of itself which depends
on something that's written in C?  (Last time I tried to research this
issue, I found it too difficult to track down old versions of GNAT to
check whether there was a path for bootstrapping it from a C compiler.)

Even gcc-c has an issue similar to this:  Current versions of gcc are
written in C90, and can't be compiled with a K&R C compiler.  We could
set up a chain of dependencies so that a system that has only a K&R
C compiler first builds gcc-2.x, then uses that to build the current
version of gcc.

--apb (Alan Barrett)