Re: URLs for new developers 20000418 - File Systems: ftp, union, global,...

[Jeff Bailey]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 07:32:23PM +0200, Ognyan Kulev wrote:

Please make sure that the address@hidden cc: is retained.

> What about including edited Hurd Web page (http://fprintf.net/hurd/)  And if
> you are interested we have to talk with Jim Franklin about merging with his
> page or something like that.  Perhaps it is an idea to be only one page with
> links that is supported by some people.
> 
> The future directions of Hurd Web page I thought of are:
> * major discussions and posts in mailing lists that clarify what's going on.

I would love to have an ongoing editor watching for "Hurd in the News".  
Do you have time to keep this up effectively/organize volunteers to do 
this?

> * more useful structure of the content.

I've been thinking about how I would like the whole site structured.

My thoughts so far:

o Hurd is just a series of processes running on top of a kernel.  We need 
to beginning focussing on the wider GNU system.

I need to fill out the "HOWTO" section with non-"Hurd/Gnumach" type of 
howtos, and see if I can get permission from some of the Linux 
documentation folks to use their "Newbie-to-linux" documentation.

o Someone needs to take ownership of TODO items for new developers.

Most TODOs are not actually kernel related.  Marcus has mentioned to me 
that some of the developers do not like getting hurd-specific bug 
reports, because they can't test them.  That means that we should 
probably have a GNATS database dedicated to Debian-Hurd bugs so that we 
can submit patches to the folks, and not annoy them with us.

Some Kernel-related TODOs are probably also reasonably easy.  There's 
code floating out there somewhere for how to build a translator in PERL.  
For example, the Entropy Gathering Daemon author (Allen Smith) mentioned 
to me at a conference that he'd be pleased to have patches to make this 
provide /dev/random and /dev/urandom on Hurd.

o We should provide tools for people who aren't interested in distributions

More than once people have mentioned on the lists that they don't use 
Debian/Hurd because they aren't interested in being bound by a 
distribution.  We should provide instructions for bootstapping from 
source a complete 
Gnumach(l4?)/Hurd/Libc/Bash/Fileutils/Shellutils/Gcc/Binutils setup.
We should probably test these instructions from Linux, BSD, and from WinNT.

I'd appreciate any feedback any these thoughts.

-- 
No matter how big the bell, if you only tap it, it can give out only a
faint sound.  We must understand thoroughly that the weakness of the blow,
not a fault of the bell makes the sound poor. 
 - Koichi Tohei