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

[Sergey Bugaev]

Hello,

I got a little bit overly emotional and personal over there yesterday,
sorry about that.

On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 11:18 PM Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> wrote:
> But at some point the less funny pieces also need to be done, otherwise
> the system becomes irrelevant.

Yes; but I can't really think of anything that would not be fun?

Doesn't mean that it'd all be fun *to me*, or that I'm the best person
to do everything, but still. I'm sure drivers are fun to write and get
working; I'm just not the best man for that particular job.

> 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.

If that's your best example of a task that is not fun... :)

Rust is awesome, I love Rust, and surely getting Rust (libstd) to work
would be *super* interesting and fun and not even hard. I did attempt
it myself in the past, but did not get very far (because I haven't
allocated enough time to it). I'd do it myself now if it wasn't a GSoC
assignment for someone else to work on, so I don't want to get in the
way.

Maybe this goes to show that the same task may be fun or not depending
on whom you ask. Again, look at how many people have expressed
interest in working on Rust + Hurd!

(By the way, do you happen to know any news about what came out of
that? Was there a specific person selected to work on the project? Is
there a blog I could follow?)

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

I appreciate that! -- and I'm sure everyone else does. Are there any
other tasks that are not fun to you that we could help you with?

> 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.

I see, well that sounds a lot more realistic then. Maybe I'll look
into it when I'm done with the other things.

> And that's actually part of the problem: it just works *a lot* nowadays,

Yes! And that's an awesome achievement!

And it's one that is not publicly known. People really do think that
the Hurd is non-functional -- and badly designed. Here, let me quote
someone (content warning: harsh words):

"the Hurd kernel is a steaming pile of crap that doesn’t function
well, or sometimes at all, after more than 30 years of off-and-on work
on it."

And it doesn't help that Linus Torvalds keeps talking negatively about
the Hurd, from his famous "just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won’t
end up like the Hurd people", and as recently as this year, "Linux is
not the heap of bad ideas that is Hurd". That of course gets amplified
and ingrained in the public opinion about the Hurd.

People on the Fediverse were genuinely surprised when I told them the
Hurd does in fact work, and that the post was sent from a Hurd system.
The Hurd can run GUI and GTK apps -- who could have thought, right?

> 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.

Well, I've done the "Fix our symlink translator" one and got exactly
zero feedback on the patch in almost three years (other than "Thanks
for working on this" from Josua).

I understand that you don't have time for it, but we're not going to
get anywhere this way. Maybe someone else could review and test out
the patch, if you cannot? Maybe you could just ship the patch in
Debian (which, even if the patch is very broken, which it's not,
should not break much since regular symlinks don't actually use
/hurd/symlink), and then everyone would be able to test it with ease.

> 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/

Yes, I've seen that.

> > 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).

Again, please do know that I appreciate everything that you do.
Without your efforts, the Hurd would really be a dead and abandoned
project.

But I'm also not at all saying that *you* have to do the publicity
work. I'm rather raising the question of what could be done here.

I'm doing my small part by posting about the Hurd (way too often) over
on Mastodon (though it feels wrong and awkward at times because it's
as if I'm stealing all the fame and praise for myself). I don't do
full-sized blogging because [0], but if it wasn't for that, I would.

[0]: https://mastodon.social/@rbanffy/110265110985481238

Maybe we could have monthly update posts on some official blog (here
[1]?), where everyone would be welcome to write a few words (or more)
on what they've been working on that month. Then we would share them
on social media etc.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/news.html

Sergey