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1. Embed this notice
   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 22:29:13 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   Ok I got the challenge to check out BLUE, a build system written entirely in Guile. So far it looks like the first ever build system I have ever encountered which I thought "this actually looks good and like something I'd like to use" https://codeberg.org/lapislazuli/blue

   I haven't watched the FOSDEM talk yet but it's here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/3A7VGM-blue/

   The slides look VERY intriguing though https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/3A7VGM-blue/slides/267268/blue_-_a_lvqucp1.pdf

   I will post updates as I go

   • Janneke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 22:32:16 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Janneke

     I saw Sergio giving @janneke a live presentation and Janneke seemed absolutely wide-eyed and amazed. I askeed Janneke "well what do you think?" and he said "I'm absolutely hooked".

     Well, I can hardly think of many people who would give a more compelling recommendation than the champion of bootstrappability efforts and founder of the Mes compiler used for those same goals. Seems promising.

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:08:17 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @cwebber
     Cc: @shepherd
     *blush* thanks!

     I've looked some more at replacing Autotools with Blue (B.L.U.E.?) for Dezyne (https://dezyne.org) and while we're not there yet (quite possibly due to my lacking Blue skills), it is looking promising, and moreover, it's been real fun!

     I have a soft spot for hacking build systems. On the one hand I hate them, but I also really like automatization and executable documentation. And I've invested some time in them. But it's always been kind of a fight. M4, Perl, Bash. config.log. Terrible. Also: why??? Anyway, now with Blue, we can hack in Guile!

     We wrote a blazingly fast build system based on GNU make for GNU LilyPond, called stepmake, because running autoreconf and automake took 45min. It never took off though. Later, I fully reimplemented LilyPond's build system in scons only to find that after a completed build, it would take "scons build" about a minute to determine that there was nothing to be done. We reverted to stepmake.

     Really looking forward to working more with Blue!

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:12:45 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber @shepherd
     I would absolutely *love* that, and we even talked about that, briefly.

     Problem is, at the moment, that Blue (still? *grin*) uses GOOPS.

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Ekaitz Zarraga 👹 (ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:12:46 JST Ekaitz Zarraga 👹

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @cwebber @shepherd also use blue for Mes? blue on Mes?

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:38:12 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @ekaitz_zarraga @shepherd I was a bit surprised by the choice of GOOPS myself!

     I am guessing the challenge with GOOPS for Mes is you need Guile itself then to bootstrap it

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:39:51 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @ekaitz_zarraga @janneke @shepherd It's probably more feasible with GOOPS being pure scheme now, but iirc it does patch some boot-9 type stuff or something? Haven't looked in a while

   • Embed this notice
     Ekaitz Zarraga 👹 (ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:39:52 JST Ekaitz Zarraga 👹

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @cwebber @shepherd should we implement GOOPS in Mes? 😈

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:46:14 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Ok booting up Blue. It's not in Guix itself yet, it seems. So I've cloned the Blue repo and am running the time-machine command it recommended:

     guix time-machine -C channels.scm -- shell -m manifest.scm

     So it does seem like "getting Blue into Guix proper" is probably a prereq for me shipping it with my own projects. Let's see tho.

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:50:42 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @cwebber @shepherd @ekaitz_zarraga
     GOOPS is great. Shepherd used it initially, but got rid of it. 8sync used it but Goblins doesn't. Dezyne uses it but is slowly getting rid of it.

     The only problem is the lack of (a well performing) syntax-case in Mes.

   • Embed this notice
     Ekaitz Zarraga 👹 (ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:50:43 JST Ekaitz Zarraga 👹

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @cwebber @janneke @shepherd We'll see, I'd expect GOOPS to have many dependencies in Guile's standard library and maybe some internals... It's probably hard to implement.

     But as always, with funding and will everything can be done. Sometimes even without the funding :)

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:53:55 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @shepherd @ekaitz_zarraga Yes, I agree with this, that has been my experience as well.

     However, GOOPS is *incredible* for getting going, and sometimes when I don't know where I want to go, I start with GOOPS!

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 23:59:56 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @ekaitz_zarraga @shepherd At any rate, I doubt GOOPS would be the only challenge. I suspect (without looking) that Blue would be using a lot of the POSIX surface of Guile.

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:04:02 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @shepherd @ekaitz_zarraga @cwebber
     Yes, same. GOOPS is amazing, multiple dispatch and whatnot (try to go back to C++ and you'll be wondering how you ever managed) and has been a life saver for me.

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:11:11 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @ekaitz_zarraga @shepherd @cwebber
     Yeah, it's just a vague dream atm. Although Mes has some POSIX stuff, being a C99 compiler and all.

     We'll see. We could always start with using blue for development and have it generate shell scripts for the bootstrap build, or something. Mes has at least 2.5 crappy build systems already. There's a wip-auto[tools] branch gaining dust for some 7 years...

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:11:55 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Got Blue to build itself. Now I need a project to work with.

     The emacs mode looks super promising too but I'm not going to prioritize that yet.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:14:15 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Ekaitz Zarraga 👹
     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke @ekaitz_zarraga @shepherd I did think about that, that maybe Blue could be used to bootstrap a small and auditable scheme file which could be run to compile the rest

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:27:53 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @shepherd @cwebber @civodul
     Yes, GUB was a mini source-based distribution for userland applications only, aimed at creating grand universal binaries, written in Python (yeah, I was a grand Python advocate back in the day). For Linux, only depending on an ancient Glibc 2.4, and cross-building to MinGW and Darwin. That also never took off; Denemo being the only project using it besides LilyPond.

     I remember being amazed at the boldness of Guix, just building everything from source. Why didn't we even think of that? I guess maybe that was a good thing.

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:27:56 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @janneke Fun. Didn’t know about stepmake, but I do remember about your work on GUB (?) which I guess was more in package management territory, right?

     @shepherd @cwebber

   • Embed this notice
     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:28:11 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     • Ludovic Courtès
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @cwebber @shepherd @civodul
     Someone needs to port BLUE to the Hurd. epoll (2) iirc.

   • Embed this notice
     Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 00:28:12 JST Ludovic Courtès

     in reply to

     • Janneke
     • Sergio Pastor Pérez

     @cwebber Having had several demos of BLUE and blue.el (!) by @shepherd, including a working port of the Shepherd from Autoconf/Automake to BLUE at the bar the other day (where I was tasked with discovering BLUE by myself), I’m also very enthusiastic!

     @janneke

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 07-Feb-2026 00:07:03 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Ok well, I have to say, omg

     The improved exception printing in BLUE?

     We need this everywhere in Guile, holy shit it's great

   • Embed this notice
     Sergio Pastor Pérez (shepherd@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Feb-2026 00:50:01 JST Sergio Pastor Pérez

     in reply to

     • Andy Wingo

     @cwebber @wingo For those outside of the loop. This is how Guile backtraces look when using BLUE's enhancements.

     All the credit should goes to my friend and wizard [Olivier](https://codeberg.org/old) who implemented this backtraces enhancements!

   • Embed this notice
     Sergio Pastor Pérez (shepherd@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Feb-2026 00:50:02 JST Sergio Pastor Pérez

     in reply to

     • Andy Wingo

     @cwebber this is some of the goodies I was saying Spritely would appreciate!

     What do you think, would Goblins benefit from the backtraces improvements? If there is enough interest we can get this into core Guile, so everyone benefits from the improvements. It's unfortunate that @wingo didn't get to see the presentation, so I think he missed the backtraces improvements BLUE made.

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.