Guix Successfully Builds a Fully Bootstrapped Mono: A Long and Winding Road

The Guix system has successfully built a fully bootstrapped Mono environment, overcoming numerous challenges in the process. The author details their journey to support C# 12.0 features, encountering issues with older Mono versions relying on pre-built binaries. Through a series of patches, a fully bootstrapped chain from Mono 1.2.6 to 6.12.0 was created. Along the way, bugs in Mono and xbuild were fixed, and runpath support in Mono was enhanced. This not only solved the author's C# compatibility problem but also highlighted the importance of fully bootstrapped, reproducible builds and their impact on software security.