Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > You should go into politics with the evading answers you are
   > giving, they have no substance other than: Do as you please, I do
   > not care.
   >
   > Which is immensly useful for setting a direction...

   As you very well know, the current situation is that Mach is
   considered unsuitable for the Hurd in a releasable state, L4 used
   to be the alternative, and we are still discussing if it will be
   used, and if not, what then.

No I don't.  Nor is this what I was asking.  Nobody has shown that
Mach is unsuitable; infact all evidence shows otherwise, it is there,
it works, and it can be improved this `new Hurd' thing cannot.  And
once again, that is not what I was asking!

   That means the project is in a very clear state at the moment,
   which is defining the design principles we want, or if we don't
   want to work from principles, defining the design goals.  No useful
   code can be written for the "new" Hurd at this moment.

So the goal is to sit on our asses waiting for the "new" Hurd to be
finished?  When will that be? Marcus made a promise to Jeff Bailey
that the Hurd on L4 would be runnable last year.

   As you yourself have stated in the past, we're a bunch of
   volunteers, nobody tells us what to work on, we choose that
   ourselves.  That's why the new microkernel needs broad support:
   Otherwise noone is going to actually build the new system.

Once again you are totally missing the point, nobody is dictating
_what_ work you should work on, on you can work on USB support if you
want, you can sit and improve ext2fs.  But you are working on
_the_Hurd_ in all cases, and I asked what the Hurd was.  As a
volunteer you can decide not to work on the Hurd, and work on
something else.  Is it a collection of kernels for the GNU system all
incompatible or is it a single kernel for the GNU system?  If the
later, what micro-kernel is being used?

No other project out there has this lack of direction at all.