mes/doc/announce/ANNOUNCE-0.22

Subject: GNU Mes 0.22 released

<#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign>

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.22, representing
57 commits over 8 weeks.

Mes can now be built reproducibly by mes+mescc or guile+mescc across
distributions such as GNU Guix, Debian GNU/Linux and NixOS.  Also, many
build issues were fixed.  A big thank you to reproducible-builds.org,
Vagrant Cascadian, Jelle van der Waa, Hannes Mehnert and David Terry!

Mes now runs on the Hurd--mescc does not run yet, many system calls are
missing, especially fork/exec--and initial scaffolding support for
creating FreeBSD binaries was added.

This release better supports bringing the Scheme-only bootstrap to Guix:
it no longer requires an update to the Guix bootstrap seed.

The Scheme-only bootstrap means that Mes can now be built with Gash and
the experimental Gash Core Utils instead of using GNU Awk, GNU Bash, the
GNU Core Utilities, GNU Grep, GNU Gzip, GNU Make, GNU Sed, and GNU Tar.
Also, the Mes C Library now supports bootstrapping those.

We are excited that the Nlnet Foundation[12] is now sponsoring this
work!

Next targets:

 - Introduce the Reduced Binaries Seed bootstrap to NixOS (Debian,
   Arch, Gentoo, ...?)
 - Merge the Scheme-only bootstrap, the wip-bootstrap branch (using
   Guile, Gash and Gash Core Utils to remove awk, bash, core utilities,
   grep, gzip, make, sed, tar, etc. from the Guix bootstrap binaries)
   into Guix core-updates.
 - ARM support
 - Full Source Bootstrap: compile Mes.c using M2-Planet
 - Add full Guile module support
 - Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for ARM
 - Support mescc on the Hurd (fork/exec, ...)

Packages are available in Guix master; the cross-distro reproducible
is built using

    guix build --system=i686-linux mes-rb5

* About

  GNU Mes[0] is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the GNU
  System.  Since version 0.22 it has again helped to halve the size of
  opaque, uninspectable binary seeds that are currently being used in the
  Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap[1] of GNU Guix[2].  The final goal is to help
  create a full source bootstrap as part of the bootstrappable builds[3]
  effort for UNIX-like operating systems.

  The Scheme interpreter is written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C, and the C
  compiler written in Scheme and these are mutual self-hosting.  This
  mes.c is being simplified[4] to be transpiled by M2-Planet[5].

  Mes has a Garbage Collector, a library of loadable Scheme modules--
  notably Dominique Boucher's LALR[6], Pre-R6RS [portable syntax-case[7]
  with R7RS ellipsis, Matt Wette's Nyacc[8] --and test suite just enough
  to support a REPL and a C99 compiler: MesCC.

  Mes+MesCC can compile an only lightly patched TinyCC[9] that is
  self-hosting.  Using this tcc and the Mes C library we now have a
  Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap for the gnutools triplet: glibc-2.2.5,
  binutils-2.20.1, gcc-2.95.3.  This is enough to bootstrap Guix for
  i686-linux and x86_64-linux.

  Mes is inspired by The Maxwell Equations of Software: LISP-1.5[10] -- John
  McCarthy page 13, GNU Guix's source/binary packaging transparency and
  Jeremiah Orians's stage0[11] ~500 byte self-hosting hex assembler.

* Download

  git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/mes.git

  Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz.sig

  Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz
    https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/mes/mes-0.22.tar.gz.sig

  Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  450c3043ad68ce942c1233282c9fa7e7  mes-0.22.tar.gz
  a318150059a2bcff6b58e765e203c05d0dfaccee  mes-0.22.tar.gz

  [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
  .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
  and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

    gpg --verify mes-0.22.tar.gz.sig

  If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
  then run this command to import it:

    gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 1A858392E331EAFDB8C27FFBF3C1A0D9C1D65273

  and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

* Get informed, get involved

  See https://bootstrappable.org
  Join #bootstrappable on irc.freenode.net.

* Changes in 0.22 since 0.21
 ** Core
 *** Mes now builds reproducibly with MesCC, cross distribution
 Using --with-bootstrap on x86, a bin/mes-mescc is compiled with
 mes+mescc, that shall have sha256sum

     722790ed261954eb53cf2cd2906c89c7589ef72b66171bbe2a9dce0f0af20232  bin/mes-mescc  v0.22
     9e0bcb1633c58e7bc415f6ea27cee7951d6b0658e13cdc147e992b31a14625fb  bin/mes-mescc  v0.21

 only differing in the version number string.

 This has been verified on GNU Guix, Debian GNU/Linux and NixOS.
 *** Mes now builds reproducibly with Guile+MesCC vs Mes+MesCC.
 *** Mes now builds reproducibly with Tiny CC-built MesCC.
 *** configure now respects the user's CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
 *** Mes now supports mescc-tools 0.5.2 next to 0.6.1.
 This allows introducing the Scheme-only bootstrap without updating or
 adding new bootstrap binary seeds into GNU Guix.
 *** Mes now runs when configured --with-courage on the Hurd:
     GNU debian 0.9 GNU-Mach 1.8+git20170609-486/Hurd-0.9 i686-AT386 GNU
 Note that mescc does not run; fork and exec are not yet implemented.
 *** Mes now configures --with-courage on x86-FreeBSD 12.1
 The initial ELF scaffold tests: exit-42.S, 0exit-42.hex2,
 body-exit-42.hex2, hello-mes.S, 0hello-mes.hex2, body-hello-mes.hex2
 pass.
 *** configure now has a --with-bootstrap option.
 This adds the reproducible bootstrap build of bin/mes-mescc, using
 mes+mescc.
 *** configure prefers $CC over gcc; tcc over gcc, gcc over cc.
 *** Mes now prints an error when attempting to read a file that does not exist.
 *** Mes no longer depends on GIT.
 ** Noteworthy bug fixes
 *** Several annoying build problems were fixed, for non-Guix systems.
 *** A bug with buffered-read was fixed.
 This means that bash-2.05 can now build glibc-2.2.5; notably it now
 successfully executes make-syscall.sh.
 *** A bug with execlp, execvp for file names containing a slash was fixed.
 This should allow make-3.80 running scripts that have "#! ./move-if-change".

Greetings,
janneke and Danny.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/mes
[1] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-by-50/
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix
[3] https://bootstrappable.org
[4] https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2
[5] https://github.com/oriansj/m2-planet
[6] https://github.com/schemeway/lalr-scm
[7] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/chezscheme/syntax-case/old-psyntax.html
[8] https://www.nongnu.org/nyacc
[9] https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc
[10] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
[11] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0
[12] https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes