Upload to Debian upstream

[McSinyx]

Bintray is sunsetting, and even if another hosting facility is found, it'll still be better if zig is available in Debian's repo. I understand that the uploading process to Debian is tedious, but I'd love to see it happens 🥺

[SmiVan]

Shouldn't Bintray sunsetting be a separate issue from this?

[dankamongmen]

I'm a Debian Developer interested in making this happen. I know there's an existing ITP for zig, let me find it...

https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2022/06/msg00023.html here we go

it looks like current zig is 0.14.0, whereas most of this work was from the 0.9.1 era.

let me take a look and see if the copyright situation has improved since 2022.

[McSinyx]

it looks like current zig is 0.14.0, whereas most of this work was from the 0.9.1 era.

Source bootstrapping Zig requires a little bit more effort now as the upstream checks in the WASM build artifact as the bootstrapping mechinism which is updated rather regularly between releases. This indicates the Zig compiler has to be built roughly that number of times to reach the latest version.

Guix's demonstrated this boostrapping path is certainly possible though.

[dankamongmen]

i definitely wouldn't want to be doing the full bootstrapping procedure (despite claims from back in the day); that's just for if you're missing builddeps, right? we'd want to be pulling anything vendored out and using debian-packaged LLVM and glibc. i just built ziglang/zig.git on debian unstable just fine in a single go...am i missing something?

[McSinyx]

The stage1/zig1.wasm file (used in bootstrap.c) is the build result of some previous version of the source code. Using it would be akin to using a gcc binary included in its source tarball to build gcc.

[dankamongmen]

thanks, grokked

[dankamongmen]

[schwarzgerat](0) $ file stage1/zig1.wasm 
stage1/zig1.wasm: WebAssembly (wasm) binary module version 0x1 (MVP)
[schwarzgerat](0) $ 

yeah

[dankamongmen]

so (not having looked at this in any depth) i'm thinking the way to go is a zig-bootstrap package which builds stage1/zig1.wasm as described in the link you provided. that's the only file it installs. then there's a zig package which build-deps and deps on zig-bootstrap. it basically just runs cmake like any other cmake-based debian package.

we keep all the hairy multistage stuff in zig-bootstrap, which hopefully won't be changing very often (again, as suggested by @andrewrk's post). that way people can easily touch the zig package, which is presumably changing more often.

we could do it all as one package, but that would add load to the build servers in the case of frequent zig rebuilds, and possibly intimidate collaborators heh.

[dankamongmen]

so it looks like in zig-bootstrap we'd need yank out the vendored lld, llvm, zstd, and zlib. let's see what we can do with that.

[dankamongmen]

alright i've got zig-bootstrap building using the host toolchain/libs

[dankamongmen]

so it looks like guix is bootstrapping 0.13 by pulling down their 0.12 zig compiler, and using that to build things, if i understand correctly: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/zig.scm#n1572

i'm stuck at the moment trying to build zig1.wasm. i didn't realize it's present as a blob in both zig-bootstrap and zig (at least as of the 0.13 releases i'm working with).

[dankamongmen]

so the main sticking point is building this zig1.wasm. i don't see from @andrewrk's blog post how this was done. looking again tonight...

[dankamongmen]

The wasm binary is produced with zig build update-zig1

hopefully this is the key to things. but to do that we need some initial zig, right?

We provide a minimal WASI interpreter implementation that is built from C source, and then used to translate the Zig self-hosted compiler source code into C code. The C code is then compiled and linked, again by the system C compiler, into a stage2 binary. The stage2 binary can then be used repeatedly with zig build to build from source from that point on.

possibly i can build a zig-12 or whatever package that just requires llvm to build. that would be a builddep of the zig-bootstrap package, which will (as described above) create zig1.wasm using this older zig.