Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders

On 4/5/21 5:52 PM, Jean Louis wrote:
> I do understand the strive to perfectionism and there are projects
> like Guix which strive to reach the point you are talking. Maybe such
> projects can become bootstrapping distributions for other
> distributions which cannot or did not reach that far yet.
Guix is nice but at the moment it requires Guile(approx 20mb of 
binaries) to bootstrap itself. Better solution is 
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap - there are even plans to 
integrate it with Guix directly, Debian and many other projects.
> What means "to trust" compiler? We already trust our compilers,
> obviously. We have confidence, faith in compilers and people making
> it. Free software is insecure and we trust people behind
> distributions. We have only freedom to verify it though largest
> majority of users including programmers cannot possibly verify free
> software on a system as it would take a life time. OpenBSD people are
> verifying the system for decades they still did not finish. It is
> never ending story.
Well I don't trust compilers like any other software and I don't trust 
any people behind them. The biggest advantage of open-source, gnu 
freedom "free software", etc in general is just the ability to verify 
the code itself. There are still many difficulties and limited ways to 
do it but it doesn't mean the verification effort is pointless. I 
believe in the future where all the basic computer 
hardware/software/systems could be formally verified and audited by 
anyone and in any time. People should be able to build from very 
scratch, from nand logical gates and below to complex linux riscv 
machines and above to have full control in all that process. Small 
simple concepts like transparency, reproducible-builds, 
bootstrappability, simplicity, minimalism, etc are very essential to 
reach that perfect goal.
> Maybe you wish to say we have to control compiler, but compiler is
> huge, not even compiler developers can know what is everything inside,
> they always find some new problems to solve.
Hopefully there are still alternatives, and if GCC won't fix itself on 
time than it gonna die by natural selection.