Um... haha... you know it's bad when I think it's a bit over the edge...
"Patrick R. Wade" wrote:
> I've been struck by that as well; is this Open Source or Open Binary? But
> to some extent it's more a matter of packaging than anything else. An
> interesting experiment might be an installer - perhaps written in perl -
> that loaded only a kernel and an interpreter into memory, used a perl-based
> compiler to build a C compiler from source, and then built the rest of the
> installation from source.
> (actually, after reading kt's paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust", i wondered
> how one could go about installing an OS that one *knew* was "clean". I
> speculated along these lines:
> 1. Create a ROM image for a system with ROM programming-language interpreters
> (maybe BASIC for an older PC, or forth for a Sun) from scratch and flash
> it into your starting host
> (alternatively, you might be able to audit your existing interpreter and
> determine if it's trapdoored somehow)
> 2. use the interpreter's language to build some primitive development tools
> (ed, yacc etc.)
> 3. use the primitive tools to build some next-generation-up tools
> 4. recurse this until you have a toolset that can compile an audited OS... )
--
Organizing Linux users is like herding cats,
only harder.
