Re: full-source bootstrap and Python

From: Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
To: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Cc: Bernhard Voelker <mail@bernhard-voelker.de>,
	Janneke Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>,
	bug-gnulib@gnu.org, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
Subject: Re: full-source bootstrap and Python
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 12:07:47 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <25178486.DPMGVJSTQ8@nimes> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87sezdetz7.fsf@kaka.sjd.se>

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> If we want to minimize the work for full-source bootstrap people we
> increase the cost of people maintaining modern software, and vice versa,

+1

> Consider the
> extreme situation where gnulib-tool version A would require coreutils
> verison B, and coreutils version B+1 would require gnulib-tool version
> A+1, and gnulib-tool version A+2 would require coreutils version B+1 and
> so on for really short release version increments.  Then a full-source
> bootstrap will need to package and keep maintain all those coreutils and
> gnulib-tool versions -- or start to patch things to avoid the
> dependencies.

Right. This way of working was pretty common in the Lisp and Haskell worlds,
many years ago. For gnulib-tool, we're relying on Python 3.7, which is
already 6 years old; so, we are clearly not doing the extreme thing.

Bruno