On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 05:00:28 +0200 Denis wrote: > If we change: > > In particular, a free system distribution should be self-hosting. > > This means that you must be able to develop and build the system with > > tools that the system provides you. As a result, a free system > > distribution cannot include free software that can only be built by > > using nonfree software. > > In: > > the distro must provide everything needed to compile itself entirely > > from scratch, and that must be possible to accomplish using at > > least one of the already-endorsed systems. > > if the distro is not capanble of compiling itself (hardware resource > > constraints, for example), complete instructions must be given, > > desribing which distro can be used to build it. > > Then we have the issue that self hosted distributions aren't necessarily > able to build themselves from scratch. > > Here PureOS and Trisquel (and maybe more) would most likely fail that > criteria: > - They don't provide everything needed to compile themselves entirely > from scratch. Fixing that would probably require a massive amount of > work (someone would need to implement some sort of bootstrapable > builds for Debian based distributions). > - Both are capable of compiling themselves, so the second part doesn't > apply.
i think it is only the words that are confusing us, not the ideas - by "from scratch", i was not suggesting anything like self-bootstrapping (ala: GNU MESS) - we dont need to require jumping down that rabitt-hole i only meant like: you could start with zero working parts of 'foo-OS', only it's recipes and instructions, plus _some_ complete working libre distro, and you can build each of the 'foo-OS' working parts, using the tools from the build host distro (or a working 'foo-OS' obviously), until eventually you have a complete working 'foo-OS' distro - the 'foo-OS' distro would only need to provide what the build host does not i dont see my revision as making the self-hosting criteria more difficult to satisfy - i intended that to relax the constraints, as to allow specialized distros like replicant, which can not build themselves on any known target hardware it is really only saying that it must be possible _somehow_, to build the distro using only free software - surely they all can so that _somehow_, or they would not exist