I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts on this:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/141448#issuecomment-941916618

W.r.t. bootstrap tools, see also #115406. These always get held up because it's hard to verify that the bootstrap tools are reproducible - how do you do that for native bootstrap tools on a platform we don't support yet? But on the other hand, cross-compiled bootstrap tools won't build stdenv because of #113977, so I'm not really sure how to proceed here.

Very true... it seems like there are three stages to building bootstrap tools:

1. Cross-compile
2. Native using cross tools
3. Native using native tools

Maybe there should be more automation around building these - like, on a system with qemu-binfmt, you have a derivation that runs through all three stages, though that requires having a way to inject the newly built bootstrap tools into nixpkgs.

The first approach that comes to mind would be adding an argument to nixpkgsFun for the seeds, which probably wouldn't be a bad idea in general. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on that though.

In reply to @piper:lutris.engineering
True, we could do that! Though that means we need to get a NixOS system working before being able to add that platform.

I'm getting some really strange test failures on coreutils for ppc64le https://termbin.com/s4vc

Example:

FAIL: tests/du/no-x
===================

--- exp	2021-10-14 16:02:44.259294987 +0000
+++ out	2021-10-14 16:02:44.206294528 +0000
@@ -1 +1 @@
-du: 'd/no-x': Permission denied
+/build/coreutils-8.32/./src/du: cannot access 'd/no-x': Permission denied
FAIL tests/du/no-x.sh (exit status: 1)

Anyone seen anything like this before?