[cycloptic]

Bootstrapping and too many binary dependencies at the early stage is a known problem in GNU Guix and there are people working to fix it, such as the GNU Mes project to bootstrap the system using a minimal compiler, shell and set of utilities written in Scheme. Despite this, there are still many steps to bootstrapping a full system and the complete process is not simple.

It's not for "no reason", in general you will not be able to get away from having a complicated build system at the lowest level. Otherwise you would need to be prepared to give up on nice things like cross-compiling and supporting more than one compiler, CPU architecture, etc.

[Ericson2314]

Actually focusing on cross generally usually forces when to be bootstrapping better.

The problem is most distros / deployed systems are managed and bootstrapped imperatively, which there is nothing pushing back against complicating the bootstrapping. Thus, entropy wins and it gets more complex.

As someone who as actually started about reproducing BSD bootstraps declaritively (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/82131/files) they are way more entangled than they need to be, so Theo de Raadt has no ground to stand on.