Ekaitz's tech blog:
I make stuff at ElenQ Technology and I talk about it

So, some merging and releasing has been done so we need to update a little bit on what we talked about in the previous blog post.

Mes

We spent some time more testing what we shared in the previous post with you and now we can proudly say our work has been merged in Mes, and has been released with it in GNU Mes 0.25.

You can read the GNU Mes 0.25 release notes in Janneke’s blog in the following link:

http://joyofsource.com/gnu-mes-025-released.html

Bootstrappable TinyCC

We are also very happy to announce that our changes to the bootstrappable TinyCC have been merged to Janneke’s repository that is used for the official Guix bootstrapping process. You can see the changes¹ being included here:

https://gitlab.com/janneke/tinycc/-/tree/mes-0.25?ref_type=heads

Some words about it

All of us are of course very happy about this, and this didn’t make us relax, as we continued to push fixes and test all this in more ways, looking always for the next challenge.

We should enjoy this moment a little bit more, and that’s why I am posting this.

I want also to thank again the people that took part in this, specially Andrius for his help, for all the hours of sleep he lost during the process and for giving a second life to this effort, when I thought I was too tired to continue; and Janneke, who very patiently reviewed every single contribution and has been pushing me since the very early beginning of this adventure, when I was thinking about accepting the challenge or continue with my life. I’m glad I chose the adventure.

Of course, this is a cool milestone for all of us, we worked hard to make this but specially for me it means a lot. I’ve been working on this for almost two years now, and since I my changes on the bootstrappable TinyCC have been sitting in my repository since the last year, when I finished the previous NlNet grant. In fact, all that I did in that grant was sitting there, nothing was merged in the actual Guix bootstrap, as what I did were very specific parts of the chain, but they lacked the connection with other steps.

When you work in a project like that there’s almost no satisfaction. No releases, no upstreaming and, in my case, almost no help and no company. Everything that I did could be sitting there in my repos forever.

At the time when I did the backport of TinyCC I was unsure of what I did and I was exhausted after all the work I did with GCC. When we started this second round I thought everything was going to be broken. And it was, but it was much better than I thought!

Now, being part of the official Bootstrappable TinyCC means I can finally close that chapter, which was full of uncertainty, and actually have some interesting feedback of all that work I did that it seemed useless at the time when I did it.

It happened to be useful after all.

Now let’s see if GCC happens to be as useful as this was.

Cheers, dear reader. We deserve to celebrate.