[varajelle]

> I can grab the kernel sources from 1997 and build them today.

Can you? Do they still compiler with current compiler? You'll probably need to find a compiler of that time... And also all the interpreter for all the build scripts. Was that using bash or some old Perl? Maybe something more esoteric like m4 or tcl?

The point is that it always had many external dependencies to bootstrap. And adding one is not such a big deal, it just add another thing to archive among the many other things. The crates.io archive is probably not even that big.

[marginalia_nu]

I'm not sure why that would be a problem given most of these languages and standards are older than the Linux kernel. The thing about mature technology is specifically that it doesn't have breaking changes every couple of months. This is the way it used to be for a fairly long time.

But even if it has broken, I can just download an old linux distro. They effectively form a cohesive snapshot of the state of the toolchain whenever they were assembled. Slackware 3.1 from 1996 might be appropriate.

[estebank]

> But even if it has broken, I can just download an old linux distro. They effectively form a cohesive snapshot of the state of the toolchain whenever they were assembled. Slackware 3.1 from 1996 might be appropriate.

You will also need era-appropriate hardware to get that software to install.