Prospectives (Was: hurd: Add expected abilist files for x86_64)

[Samuel Thibault]

Sergey Bugaev, le mar. 02 mai 2023 22:58:24 +0300, a ecrit:
> On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 10:06 PM Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> 
> wrote:
> >
> > Sergey Bugaev, le mar. 02 mai 2023 21:59:40 +0300, a ecrit:
> > > I don't see how network/disk/USB are relevant
> >
> > What I mean is that we don't have much workforce. If we keep
> > reimplementing things that already work fine enough, we'll not be making
> > useful progress.
> 
> That's true; but I might offer a different perspective here. In
> SerenityOS, we have this principle (quoting from FAQ):
> 
> > # Will SerenityOS support `$THING`?
> > Maybe. Maybe not. There is no plan.
> > # When will you implement `$THING`?
> > Maybe someday. Maybe never. If you want to see something happen, you can do 
> > it yourself!
> 
> There's no plan; everyone just hacks on whatever they feel like! The
> end result is not that important, what's important is that we all have
> fun.
> 
> Same here: I haven't seen any roadmap for what the Hurd must achieve.

Yep, sure!

But at some point the less funny pieces also need to be done, otherwise
the system becomes irrelevant. For instance, we *do* need rust
implemented, otherwise we'll lose libgtk support, and probably soon
enough also libxml2 and whatnot re-implemented in rust.

To put another perspective: I have been doing that less funny part for a
long time already. I can't do everything alone.

> As you must be aware by now, I... know very little about systems
> development, actually.

That is absolutely no problem.

> I know nothing about hardware. I can't write drivers. I barely know
> what an IRQ is! So you can't really expect me to work on writing USB
> drivers, if that's what you mean.

I'm *not* meaning to write USB drivers, but to fix building rump to use
its USB drivers.  The PCI/IRQ/etc. part is already working for AHCI, the
USB stack is probably not that much more work, and not technical work.

> The point being, if you consider USB drivers a priority

It's less a priority than e.g. 64bit support and SMP support, but people
do have USB CD readers and USB sticks that we really want to support.

> On another note: maybe it would be beneficial to get more people
> interested / involved in the Hurd?

Of course.

> Again, look at how Serenity has grown from someone's personal project
> our own [...]
> our own [...]
> our own [...]
> [...]
> I could go on and on.
> We could be making this same kind of progress on the Hurd side!

We have already done that actually.

And that's actually part of the problem: it just works *a lot* nowadays,
so the small fun parts are done. I have put some smallish items on

https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/contributing/#index1h2

but that doesn't seem to be picked up, mostly.

Larger items are quickly very hairy, e.g. SMP support is still an
upcoming very large beast.

I won't continue repeating myself, see my 4-year-old-already talk at
FOSDEM:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/roadmap_for_the_hurd/

> There's not enough publicity that the Hurd still exists, is developed,
> and actually works quite well. People think that it is an abandoned,
> failed project.

Yes. It's yet another "it's a matter of"... reviving the quarters of the
Hurd. That is missing somebody taking up the task.

(And no, I cannot do that. Basically, anything that is "Samuel could do
XXX" won't work: I'm already completely overloaded, I just cannot do
more, and especially not publicity or community maintenance, I'm just
completely no good at that).

Samuel