[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why

This year's edition of the Free and OpenSource Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to thebeautiful (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 atFOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legaland community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchainsand Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentationabout bootstrappable builds,which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWNdid look at the topic just over two yearsago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tinyprogram that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yetanother, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space isbuilt from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with acompletely understood origin-unlike a typical Linux user space today.