how's bootstrapping rust story nowadays?
But I don't get why some people are obsessed with bootstrapping. Yes it is good to be able to do it, but it isn't something you need to do regularly.
Especially since rust had a much better cross compilation story than C or C++ (not as good as go or zig though), so you don't need to bootstrap on a new architecture, just cross compile to it. Furthermore, new architectures for hosting a compiler (as opposed to just a target, like microcontrollers) is a rare event. Just something that happens every few years.
It only matters if you have supply chain attacks in your threat model. Given they are up 400x since 2019, they should probably be in almost every threat model. Most distros operate on the honor system and that is not going to survive the post AI world.
Distros that are not fully hermetic and don't have reproducible packages (and there are many layers of reproducibility) will certainly have issues, but that's not a huge problem as long as you have a documented path to getting back to the current state. It doesn't need to be the fastest path, just a verifiable chain of trust.
It is critical to encourage many independent verifications that it be as fast as possible that someone can go from a clone of our tree of pure source code to the exact release hashes we publish.
Adding any binaries to that means someone that distrusts us must now go build those past releases as well, and if they rely on binaries, they must build those past past releases as well. This approach would make verification time go up dramatically every release.
Also, while you can use the latest prebuilt as a stage0, you could also use any other prebuilt from earlier down the chain as a stage0 and still get the same stage2 binaries. This is the next trust checkpoint you have, and it should be fine to have multiple ways to get there too, one for quick iterative releases and one that is reusing the minimal amount of bootstrapped packages.
Or you just try to only upgrade your stage0 once in a while when extremely necessary and it would build your new stage2.
So many ways to optimize the system, it's a choice to refuse to reuse what was trusted yesterday in order to build the next stage.
If the point is to let independent people verify the full build chain, then there is no "trust from yesterday" to reuse.
Even worse, if every release N depends on trusting release N-1, then you need to do a full rebuild of everything in the whole history, instead of just building the current release. This doesn't sound reasonable, or at least sounds incompatible with the project goals.