Re: A simple question

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 10:48:50AM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> I'm not sure that I deserve all of the blame for this! :-)

I didn't mean to blame you... (Well, really I did, but I'd never admit
that openly ;-) )

> I certainly described EROS and Coyotos, but I hope that I did not
> divert the project. Marcus and Neal described to me certain things
> that they wanted to achieve. I suggested refinements, and I pointed
> out that persistence has a major influence on how these goals are best
> achieved. The issue of persistence is definitely a new issue, but I
> think this could be done on L4.sec as well. As for the rest, I *hope*
> that what I provided was acceleration in the design process.

I don't think your influence resulted in acceleration only. Many of the
concepts are quite radical, and I doubt that left to themself the
Hurd/L4 designers would have arrived at similar ideas. More likely they
would have just become more and more frustrated that after several
redesigns the system still doesn't quite meet their expectations...
Which, of course, still can happen.

Diverted... I don't know. I don't think you considerably influenced
Marcus' and Neal's goals. (Probably a bit, but not too much.) What you
did was making them aware that the existing Hurd design would probably
never have met their goals. The fact that the result of the redesign is
very different from the original Hurd, just means that Hurd really
wasn't quite what they wanted in the first place. Without your
influence, they might have never realized that, or only much later --
not sure about the effect on the project.

As for the others, my impression is that they don't really have any
strong opinion what they want the system to be -- they'd probably go
with anything that seems interesting enough one way or another.

-antrik-