[Openmcl-devel] Building from CVS

[David Steuber]

On Apr 6, 2005, at 6:53 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> There isn't any sort of secret (general) recipe; there are a lot
> of ad-hoc, one-time-only approaches to specific issues.  If anyone's
> ever interested in knowing how particular changes are bootstrapped,
> I'll try to explain how I did something. I think that it's probably
> of limited interest most of the time, and I try to provide images
> in the testing directory as soon as the dust appears to have settled.

Thanks for the explanation, Gary.  I think I get it now.  What you 
describe reminds me very much of Ken Thompson's famous essay on trust:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Is this the "meta" in meta-circular, or the removal of meta?

http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/MetaCircular.html

This is the first time I've run into a concrete instance of this 
chicken-egg situation.  I'm used to applications compiling from raw 
source.  Even GCC can be hosted from a different C compiler.  And I've 
used OpenMCL to bootstrap SBCL.

Thanks again.