Dear Michael,

On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 05:07:17PM +0000, Michael Ackermann via Tinycc-devel 
wrote:
> VSOBFS [...] i've placed this on a different page together with
> Minix to clarify upon what the differences are and why this seems insufficient
> to solve some important bootstrapping issues

I appreciate if you refrain from spreading FUD.

Can in happen that you are still not aware that VSOBFS indeed _provides_
complete proven source-only-based

1. toolchains (at you choice, tinycc or gcc which has been tested) and
2. the OS environment needed for building, i.e. the kernel and the
   relevant utilities, at your choice, Minix or Linux

Also you can have missed that you can repeat this process on virtually
any Posix-like platform and verify that the result will be the same,
reflecting only the sources used?

Readily available are runnable tinycc-20a1ebf binaries and the matching
C-libraries for both Minix and Linux, again, with proven provenance
exclusively from the corresponding sources.

To use them to build e.g. the latest tinycc in the same clean environment
is straightforward and fully scriptable, in Bourne sh.

As an alternative, extracting the binaries to a compatible environment
of your choice (e.g. from the Linux disk image, to instead run under a
modern Linux x86_64 kernel) is of course trivial.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For extra clarity:

Unaudited OSs och toolchains are sufficient to produce verifiably clean
toolchains solely from the corresponding sources.

The "trusting trust" compiler backdoor problem does not stand any longer.

Trying to imitate the 1970-s manual compiler bootstrapping on modern
hardware can be a nice exercise to study compilers and operating systems,
but pretending to solve a security problem this way is either a sign
of naïveté or of dishonesty.

Cheers
/tccm

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