[Nix-dev] Re: Please update of stdenv-linux tarballs

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

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

> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:39:24AM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
>> Hi Lluís, > 
>>  > The new bootstrap-tools for i686 are built with glibc 2.12.1 built
>>  > with gcc 4.3 [...].
>> 
>> is it really necessary to use the bleeding edge versions of everything
>> for *bootstrapping*? These choices mean that it is impossible to install
>> NixOS inside a CentOS 5 host OS, because their kernel doesn't work with
>> glibc 2.12. 
> Uhm... I wonder how we could deal with it.
> One way is getting the stdenv bootstrap longer and longer, passing maybe
> through multiple glibc and gcc versions. We already added a new binutils stage
> in the middle to avoid rebuilding i686-linux binutils recently.

[...]

> glibc 2.12 needs gcc 4.4 to build its SSE code because otherwise it builds it
> with bad stack alignment

While I understand the reason to upgrade the bootstrap tools here, I
also think it would be nice if we could manage to upgrade them as rarely
as possible.  I think the addition of the Binutils stage was nice in
that regard.

OTOH, we don’t want to make bootstrapping too complex either, so there’s
surely a trade-off here, and it probably needs to be considered on a
case-by-case basis.  For this particular case, avoiding the upgrade
would have been costly, I guess.

As for the broken Red Hat kernel, I think it’s great if Nixpkgs can
support it, but only if that’s not too much of a maintenance burden; the
primary target should remain NixOS, and then distributions that ship
(almost) unmodified upstream software.

My 2¢,
Ludo’.

PS: BTW, kudos to Lluís for this all this hard work!