Re: full-source bootstrap and Python

[Bruno Haible]

Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> For the current situtation (that's less than great and are
> working on to resolve), making essential GNU packages less
> bootstrappable is of no consequence.

OK. That's what I conjectured. Thanks for confirming.

> Cleaning-up the full-source
> bootstrap and making it more or less future-proof, might be challenged
> by such a new dependency.

I see. So, I wondered whether Python can be compiled by the last C-only
GCC, gcc-4.7.3. And yes, Python-3.7.17 (the minimum supported version
for gnulib-tool) compiles with gcc-4.7.3. Whereas a newer version,
Python-3.12.2, doesn't.

> As an example, we have been working on the
> RISC-V bootstrap for about a year with three people.  One of the
> problems here is that RISC-V was only added to a non-bootstrappable
> version of GCC: 7.5.0, while the GCC team failed to maintain their last
> bootstrappable version: 4.7.4.  In other words, the RISC-V backend
> needed to backported and someone else now needs to maintain a
> bootstrappable version of GCC.

Oh, you don't allow yourself to use a cross-compiler from, say, x86?
I mean, running a complete x86 bootstrap, followed by the creation of
a cross-compiled RISC-V compiler, in a virtualized environment on RISC-V
could work in theory (although it would be very slow).

Bruno