Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/

This year’s edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Yearly conference, better known as “FOSSY”, moved north to the
beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC)
in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions:
Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at
FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal
and community issues, to the “FOSS in Daily Life” talks. In the “Toolchains
and Other Development Tools” track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation
about bootstrappable builds,
which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN
did look at the topic just over two years
ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny
program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet
another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is
built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a
completely understood origin—unlike a typical Linux user space today.