On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 06:39:03PM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote: Erm, sorry. That's a bit of a scratch pad I use for collecting snippets of stuff that will later be put into proper documentation, and it's not public. Sorry. Here's the text I wrote: -- 8< -- Many programming language implementations are written in that same language. This creates a bootstrapping problem: how do we build the compiler or interpreter so we can run it to build itself. Usually, each language implementation provides a way to do the bootstrap. For example, the Vala implementation compiles to C (rather than executable code), and provides the generated C files, which can then be built into a native executable. Often this is only done for releases: the generated files are included in the release tar file, but not in the version control system. Since Baserock builds from the version control system, this creates an extra step for us. The general principle for us to solve this is as follows: * we create a `baserock/bootstrap` branch in our git repository, which has all the generated source code, and can be built with just the usual devel stratum * during the Baserock bootstrap build, we build from `baserock/bootstrap` until pass 2, and can thus create a working (if unclean) version of the language implementation * in the devel stratum, we build from the normal branch (no generated files), but this works because we already have a working compiler Every language implementation is different, however, and needs to be considered separately. -- 8< -- Again, sorry. -- http://www.codethink.co.uk/

On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 04:38:31PM +0200, Jürg Billeter wrote: Thanks for the tip, while we may want to mirror it, letting someone else keep it working would save us work. We hit this problem with other projects, we re-timestamp every file before building, so we won't need this option.