Re: [gentoo-dev] remove system set?

["Gregory M. Turner" <gmt@malth.us>]

On 8/16/2012 8:26 PM, Michael Mol wrote:

> Ideally, you'd want as narrow a bootstrapping channel as possible.

I guess I tend to think that, too, and I'm pretty sure it's correct. But 
I don't normally think about why, and since you've prompted me to do so, 
perhaps it's a good moment to interject the fairly obvious, but 
amusingly contrary notion that there is too much of a good thing to be 
had in this dimension.

I suppose the main reason to want a minimal pre-bootstrap tool-chain is 
to maximize repeatability, minimize platform quirks, maximize 
time-stability in the face of changing code bases, and so forth.

Plus... you know... it's a lot more likely to make somebody say "Wow!" 
the "narrow" way.  Which maybe sounds like I'm poking fun, but I do 
actually think there's some intrinsic value in that.

However, there /are/ also reasons to make the bootstrap-er machine more 
fat and complex.  Most of them boiling down to there only being so much 
time in a day.

Otherwise we would boot-strap from stage -10, consisting only of a sed 
script and some architecture files to generate crude asm lexers ....
:)

-gmt