Interesting things I saw at FOSDEM 2024 (day 2)

Bootstrapping RISC-II.5 ?

I only caught half of that presentation on bootstrapping RISC-V, and it mostly went over my head. But I was interested to know that at some point they have to recompile tinyCC five or six times with itself, adding feature flags each time to build towards a fully featured version of the compiler. Once the fully feature version compiles itself one last time to check for an exact bitwise match, they can use tinyCC to compile GCC and start the process all over again.

In one of the question someone mentioned bootstrapping a WASM runtime and putting having a fully featured compiler in a WASM bin as a way to shortcut this process.

We have github at /gnu/store/

Arun Isaac presented a guix channel to install and configure a small git repo website based on cgit. In this context guix was not only a package manager but amanged also the services and their containment all based on simple declarative files. As I said yesterday, I haven't looked to much into guix, but this fossdem has given me reason enough to be interested.

A very spirited presentation of Spritely.

The people at Spritely are looking to help the creation of decentralized community by, as far as I understand providing a way to easily write decentralized programs. On their way to do that they build a scheme to WASM, and are trying to standardize the protocols needed for such decentralized programs. I didn't understand everything, or most, of what they are trying to do, but they certainly convinced me to look into it more in the future.

A tree of trust.

I had only heard of Sequoia through the kerfuffle with LibrePGP. The presentation today made a very interesting point of the way they use the Web-of-Trust mechanic already present in OpenPGP to lets users build their own trust model based on publicly available evidence. This help a lot in figuring out key ownership in a world were thrid-party key-signing never became as commonplace as the initial design would have needed.

You think you know git ?

A pretty fun presentation of tricks and tips for git by Scott Chancon one of the co-founders of github. Includes such bangers as:

• git blame/log -L <line range> for a more focused way of throwing someone under the bus.
• git blame/log -L :<func name> ditto.
• git blame -C -C -C pass on blame to someone else
• git log -S <search rexp> find when /rexp/ was added.
• signing commits with ssh keys
• signing pushes
• git maintenance start for faster operations down the line
• sparse clones/checkouts for big mono-repos

Pijul the future future git ?

Pijul is a distributed version control systems that purports to avoid a lot of the complexities found in git through the application of clever math. It looks great in theory, mostly thanks to the fact the math are a bit to far for me. I'd hoped this presentation would be a more concrete view of Pijul in action, but alas. Maybe the only way to get that is to try it for one self.