I’m happy to announce the release of Aux Foundation, a binary bootstrap chain for Nix. This allows us to build a modern, core set of tools (like GCC, Python, etc) from a single ~300-byte binary seed file. Aux Foundation is was made possible by the bootstrapping efforts in Guix as well as the work and help of Emily Trau.
Today Aux Foundation provides an i686-linux bootstrap chain. In the future we may be able to provide one for x86_64-linux as well, but certain blockers remain there. For now it is best used as a starting point to do cross compilation and build a larger package set. Currently this is being experimented on in Tidepool.
Again, I cannot give enough thanks to the Guix developers, Emily Trau, and everyone else who has worked on creating and porting this bootstrap chain. The work is extremely difficult and unforgiving at the lower levels and getting it all working is nothing short of incredible.