Re: about GNU Hurd

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 10:18:46PM +0200, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> The reason why there have not been any new snapshots, is because the
> development of the Hurd has slowed down since the last snapshot was
> made.  Just recompiling things for the sake of recompiling is not a
> useful way to manage resources.  The Hurd has not had any noticible
> development since the last snapshot,

I know Alfread doesn't agree on this, but I must say that I see a pretty
different picture. There actually have been quite considerable
improvments in stability and software compatibility.

It's true that many of these improvements didn't make it to the official
repositories, due to hostility of the glibc maintainer and often lacking
responsiveness of the Hurd maintainer(s). Nevertheless, all the patches
can be found on the the patch tracker and/or mailing list, as well as in
the Debian packages.

> GCC is still broken, and glibc does not work.

Barring the aforementioned upstream caveat: GCC 4.1 actually works
except for gcj; 4.2 is also supposed to work. Don't know about trunk or
4.3.

Glibc 2.5 works (now even with TLS), though trunk and 2.6 do not.

> Nobody has sadly done anything to fix these problems.

This is a very unfair statement, dismissing a considerable amount of
work done by Barry deFreese, Samuel Thibault, Thomas Schwinge, Aurelien
Jarno, and maybe others on glibc alone.

-antrik-