Re: what happend?

[William ML Leslie]

Hi.  Take my response with a grain of salt, I'm not a Hurd developer,
although I used a pure GNU machine for development for ~5 years and
always wanted to work on it.  So, I could completely misrepresent how
the Hurd hackers feel about the direction of the project.

On 19 April 2013 07:36, rob fon <address@hidden> wrote:
> why mailing list so dead?

People are off solving other problems.  Problems in distributed
computing, problems in security, and problems in usability; while
hurd-ng suggested at several ways to solve many such problems, the
solutions that grew (often somewhat organically) into those spaces
gradually drew attention toward them.

> is there still hope?

Motivating system-level solutions to these problems is not difficult
in a vacuum, but I guess people are busy doing other things.  There
are people doing research or attempting to implement real operating
systems (I guess TUD and HelenOS are still under active development as
examples), and The Hurd continues to make progress in Debian atop the
GNU Mach kernel.

A few committed developers - and lets face it, a few begins with one -
could probably get a usable GNU/Hurd system on top of a kernel like L4
in a few years.  Samuel and Thomas could probably do it on their own
if they had a sufficient wage.

> why is there more developement on mach when other microkernels have proven
> better?

Mostly because, in an unusual cycle, choice of kernel doesn't matter
that much when developing the set of servers. GNUMach is useful
because it currently has semi-decent driver support.

> note: this is my first mailing list subscription yay!

I think it was probably mine too, in 2006/2007!

Don't forget to always check who you are replying to.  Current gmail
seems to do the wrong thing.  The to: address (or cc:) should be
l4-hurd; if you are using the web UI, you can get it there by
selecting "<<= reply to all" in the drop-down at the top of the
compose box.

--
William Leslie