Hi Okuji, > That's interesting, but what I'm more interested in is the reason > why the number of developers doesn't increase, even though so many > people subscribe to the list. This is not ironical but a purely > academic interest for me. first of all, we need some kind of early release (or pre-release, if you prefer to call it so) that could be burned on a CD-R! Getting all those .debs over a modem link is not only awful, but in some countries really expensive. And I'm not yet talking about the difficulties in getting accurate and actual informations about the needed packages.
Marcus' tar-balls are here a real good starting point for first-time users, but it would be even better to provide splitted files for users with flaky connections (Marcus?). Actually, with Marcus' help, it is much more easy to get the pieces of a working Hurd together and I also mean the .debs. Thank you! You're doing a extremely valuable job at this. Another important missing point is PPP. We really need PPP in the first place, so that it is possible to cvsup (or cvs update) current sources directly from a running Hurd system. One (probably quick) way to get PPP would be to use FreeBSD's _user-level_ ppp(8), which works through a tunnel device of the FreeBSD Kernel (an excellent, highly configurable and very user friendly tool, IMHO). A fix may be to provide a tunnel translator in the sense of FreeBSD, on which ppp(8) could dock. This approach may be even compatible with Mach's and the Hurd's philosophy. Any takers? Once we get PPP up and running, it may be a good idea to start thinking (and experimenting) with some kind of installation over the 'Net (be it PPP or Ethernet). Here again, FreeBSD is a good example of how it can be done. Software that just needs one or two boot floppies to be downloaded manually and which then pulls itself off the 'Net is not only easy to setup, but also very practical in case of catasrophic failures etc. Of course, PPP would then allow us to CVSup actual packages and sources in the same way as (again) FreeBSD, so we can easily keep our trees sync'ed to the -CURRENT or (maybe soon) -STABLE branch of development (please forgive my FreeBSD centrism here, I'm not trying to convert anyone to a special way of proceeding. It just happens to be the way I'm tracking the current state of my system here which works very well for me...). One unfortunate point is currently IMHO that the docs are suggesting, that a Linux system may be necessary to install the Hurd (you know, mke2fs etc...). This stopped some non-(Debian)-Linux people that are coming from the Solaris or *BSD world, or even the non-Unix world, to seriously consider installing the current version of the Hurd on their boxes. Many people reading this would certainly refrain from having to first get and install Linux, just to be able to add the Hurd in one free partition. The ext2fs tools could be easily added to a first or second boot floppy in the first place! And yes, the docs... Although things start improving now, we still need a lot more of tutorial-like materials. "Hello worlds" for misc. parts of the system may be one way to introduce newbies to the internals of Mach and the Hurd(-libraries). I'm thinking here especially of small dummy translators, dummy filesystems and other simple user-level programs. The docs could also be expanded by links to (or mirrors of) papers about Mach research, issues of OS-Design (here especially the microkernel vs. monolithic approaches) and the original CMU- and OFS-1 Mach documentation. If someone knows about a link of this kind, please mail it to me. I'll gather all I can and will summarize later. A very good book about Mach is Boykin [et al]'s "Programming under Mach". Is this book out of print? If so, how about talking to Addison-Wesley so that they provide a PostScript copy of this book to all of us? If that is not possible, how about a volunteer willing to write his/her own introduction to Mach (and probably even the Hurd) and make this publicly available? I'm thinking here about some kind of (clean room) rewrite of Boykin's book for the first part of the intro, followed by Hurd specific issues in a subsequent part. Another way may start with a tutorial on programming with the Hurd, introducing Mach later on. Lots of pics would help visualize the communication flows between misc. parts of the system (Hurd and Mach alike). The introduction should contain many small tutorials and example programs, which should be ready to run on the Hurd. Of course, this is a major undertaking and it may be a good idea to coordinate our work in some CVS repository. If we do it right, this could even become the first virtual GNU book of its kind ;-) I already have an outline of a possible introduction to Mach and the Hurd in mind. If there are no objections, I can volunteer to coordinate the efforts in this direction. So long, -Farid. -- Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Administrator | Phone: +49-2131-67-555 Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany | [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - + - - - - - - - - - - - - Fermat: ...I've found a remarkable proof for this: Let x,y @[EMAIL PROTECTED]@ NO CARRIER
