Here’s a talk some people here may be interested in:
The recording quality isn’t amazing, but I think the content is interesting. Its about reducing the size of the initial binaries needed to bootstrap a system, ideally down to (nearly) 0. It looks like there has been quite some progress.
Somewhat related discussion I started a while ago: Meta attribute for binary packages
Note that although this work is grounded in Guix and the main people involved are mostly active in Guix, the fruits of this work are going to benefit Nix as well!
http://www.joyofsource.com/gnu-mes-019-released.html
work is ongoing to audit and verify this bootstrap path in NixOS.
Next targets:
- replace the NixOS bootstrap
Minimization of bootstap sounds like mostly distro-independent thing. Once you get up from the super-minimal state, I think it’s not too hard to build basically anything, after a few iterations.
Thanks for the link, nice to have a rss feed for this effort. Do you know if there is a nixpkgs PR for the nixos work?
Yeah, hypothetically it shouldn’t be too hard to do, mostly a matter of repackaging the steps. And since they’re done for guix there shouldn’t be any purity issues to work around either, and the general structure of things should be familiar.
But that’s easy for me to say, I’m not putting in the work. 
All I know is what you can read there and what’s written about mes elsewhere e.g. on the guix list and on http://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html . I looked around a bit on github but didn’t see anything obvious.
I’m asking around: LIBRANET.de | clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 @ LIBRANET.de
/via
O.O
<3
thanks for the link!