Hi Simon, It would be really great to have pnut be part of a Debian bootstrap build!
The issue you refer to is stale, pnut can now bootstrap TCC successfully. I'm currently working on packaging the "shell-to-TCC" bootstrap so that people can reproduce my results. You can play with the first steps of the bootstrap process (going from the shell to an executable pnut-exe) by following the instructions in the README[0]. Also, since a lot of activity is happening on the live-bootstrap side, I opened a PR[1] that demonstrates how pnut can be used to bootstrap TCC and some of the benefits it brings, such as fast bootstrap and small source code size. Laurent [0]: https://github.com/udem-dlteam/pnut#reproducible-builds [1]: https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/pull/554 On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 5:07 PM Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> wrote: > Laurent Huberdeau <[email protected]> writes: > > > Hi everyone, > > > > I recently finished my master's thesis[0] arguing for the use of POSIX > > shell for diverse double-compilation and reproducible builds. It also > > presents pnut[1], a C compiler capable of bootstrapping itself and TCC > > (Linux i386) exclusively from any POSIX-compliant shell (bash, ksh, dash, > > zsh, etc.) and human-readable source files. > > > > Curious to hear your thoughts! > > Wow, that is really impressive! I'm looking into packaging for Debian, > maybe this could be part of a bootstrap build of Debian. But can it > build TCC or not? The README suggests yes but > https://github.com/udem-dlteam/pnut/issues/63 suggests no, although it > may be old. > > /Simon >
