• [$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Tue Aug 18 06:40:09 2026
    This year's edition of the Free and Open
    Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC)
    in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions:
    Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal
    and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains
    and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation
    about bootstrappable builds,
    which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN
    did look at the topic just over two years
    ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny
    program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is
    built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a
    completely understood origin-unlike a typical Linux user space today.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/
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