On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 11:14:12AM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > A *port* however should not be going around changing things willy nilly. A > Debian GNU/HURD system should be very close to a Debian GNU/Linux which > would be even closer to a Debian GNU/BSD (due to their more similar > kernel design).
To turn this into a more constructive direction, I invite you to try the Hurd out and let us know on debian-hurd where we fail to achieve this and could do better. Most of my (Deina GNU/Hurd related) time is spent on packages which are unnecessarily linux-specific, and bring them back in a more portable direction, which should work across any unixish system. So, in my eyes, the best way is not to try to make Debian GNU/Hurd as similar to Debian GNU/Linux as possible, but to make both as similar as possible *to each other*. This is probably what you meant anyway, but I want to point out that this requires changes to Debian GNU/Linux as well as to the Hurd. But this is all blabla. The actual truth is that most changes are simply bug fixes or trivial incompatibilities, and only very few things are really different from a user perspective. To proof my point, the ftp archive contains several hundred packages which are build from the same source as the linux packages with the same name. > I know the HURD people want to do interesting and innovative things. IMHO > that is a project for FSF GNU/HURD - and isn't really suitable for > Debian's UNIX-Like distribution, which HURD is a kernel port of currently. I don't think any person involved in Debian GNU/Hurd thinks this narrow. There is a simple reason: Linux already does all you want in Debian GNU/Linux, and if the only reason for Debian GNU/Hurd is to run a different underlying kernel, the effort is completely boring and wasted, and I'd better not spent a single keystroke on it. > > And we use /libexec (which is IMHO a good idea), which is > > something that could be changed if really, really necessary. > > > Frankly I'd drop this. <shrug> It is against Debian policy and for > instance if someone were to file a bug that APT doesn't use libexec I'd > promptly close it. Well, we are certainly not going to ask anybody to use libexec in the current situation. It's only the Hurd package installing some files there, I was just mentioning it for completeness anyway. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
