Is Guix full-source bootstrap a lie?
The article discusses Guix's transparent and secure full-source bootstrap process, enabling users to verify over 22,000 nodes like Python PyTorch with 1150 dependencies. It emphasizes verifying each step to prevent backdoors or fraud.
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The article discusses the Guix full-source bootstrap process, emphasizing transparency and security in software supply chains. Guix enables users to inspect and verify the building process of over 22,000 nodes in a package graph, such as Python PyTorch with its 1150 dependencies. The article delves into the recursive nature of the chicken-or-the-egg problem in computing, highlighting the importance of verifying each step in the software build chain to prevent potential backdoors or fraud. Guix's approach involves starting from minimal bootstrap-seeds, building up through various dependencies, and ensuring transparency in the entire process. The Guix community's efforts and tools like bootar, guile-bootstrap, and stage0-posix are instrumental in this complex yet meticulous process. The article showcases how Guix allows users to audit, inspect, and verify each component in the software supply chain, promoting trust and reproducibility in software builds.
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2 comments> No, it is not a lie!
But at least it's the first line... though of course that's after you've clicked, so I'd still say clickbait.
Anyways.
I wonder how hard it is to independently run this bootstrap without having guix in the first place? If I really wanted to prove that all of this was clean, I think I'd need to start from something else - maybe go write a tiny emulator on a commodore 64 that's just enough to run the bootstrap seed and write it to... maybe there's an adapter that would let a C64 write to an SD card, so you can plug that into an x86 machine to bootstrap from there? Because to avoid Trusting Trust, you'd have to start with a totally blank disk, right? I mean, I'm pretending the C64 is 100% perfectly trustworthy but I guess in theory you should be doing a nand2tetris type deal and building a machine out of actual discrete transistors. (And you'd have to trust the firmware the moment you got to a "real computer", of course, which is actually worse IMO...)
(Of course, the real result is that I read that someone else, who I expect is trustworthy and smarter than me, has run this whole thing and it does in fact work and I can just consume the result, but it's good that people are independently verifying as well)
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