[Nix-dev] Re: Simple build tool for scala.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Lluís!

Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viriketo at gmail.com> writes:

> On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 10:52:36PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> David Brown <nix at davidb.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Building the launcher itself from source isn't commonly done,
>> > especially since sbt's build system uses sbt.
>> 
>> Isn’t there a way to bootstrap it?  I would find it nicer to build from
>> source, so the relation between the source and binary is formally
>> established.
>
> We have some cases like that in in nixpkgs: gcc, gnat, ghc, ...

Right, but we’re talking about a simple build tool (heh), not a
compiler.  :-)

And the situation is different: GCC can always be compiled from source,
using a C compiler (not necessarily GCC).  Likewise, GNU Make can be
compiled from source, using another ‘make’ implementation.  At some
point, of course, one needs a pre-compiled C compiler and ‘make’, which
is why Nixpkgs comes with bootstrap binaries.

GHC can be compiled from source, but only with a previous version of
itself, I think.

MIT/GNU Scheme can only be compiled with the very same version of
itself, so “source” tarballs contain a mixture of source and
pre-compiled binaries.  This is quite inelegant IMO.

Thanks,
Ludo’.