[eptcyka]

Can’t say I’m a fan of Nix evangelists pointing their finger at any problem and yelling how it would be solved better by using Nix, but in this case, one could pin a nixpkgs version and all the sources for llvm, gcc and ocaml, and thus have a reproducible bootstrap. Ultimately, it wouldn’t do anything different to what was done manually here, but pinning commits will save the archaelogical burden for the next bootstrapper.

[chubot]

Does re bootstrapping Rust like this actually work? How much work is it?

[LegionMammal978]

Lots of work, you need hundreds of steps across the snapshots, and patches for each one to get them to work. (E.g., the makefile had hardcoded -Werror for ages.) Not to mention that if you want to make it portable, you must always start with the i686 version and cross-compile from there. (Preferably leaving x86 as late as possible: the old LLVM versions are full of architecture-specific quirks.)