Re: Please explain these fundamental terms to me?

[Sage Gerard]

Excuse my mistake in missing the definition of binary seed mentioned here "opaque ascii or binary seeds that are injected during build time." Disregard that part.

On 9/24/21 2:35 PM, Sage Gerard wrote:

Hello!

I'm confused about fundamental definitions from the manual.

> Possibly one of the most harmless, but certainly by far the biggest binary seed that all software distributions inject are the so [called] bootstrap binary seed. Bootstrap binaries are the initial binary seeds that are used to start building the distribution. -- https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/manual/html_node/Bootstrappable-Builds.html

This definition of bootstrap binary seeds confused me because

• "Binary seed" itself is not defined. After some searching, my understanding is that this is a verified binary you inject among source code to produce more software. Is that correct?
  
• it switches from singular to plural form. "The biggest binary seed is the bootstrap binary seed", followed by "Bootstrap binaries are the initial binary seeds." How do these sentences reconcile?

Also, in reading section 1.4 I didn't come away knowing what a full source bootstrap even is. Does that mean you reproduce the hex0 binary, and then use progressive stages to eventually reproduce the source code for a version of Guix? Or does it mean that you reproduce an exact disk image for an OS for the same CPU architecture as the hex program, with a copy of the Guix source ready to go on that system?