Re: The Hurd and bcachefs

[jbranso]

September 30, 2023 12:19 PM, "Samuel Thibault" <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> wrote:

>> are there videos of Samuel
>> doing your day to day maintenance tasks of maintaining the Hurd?
> 
> That'd be relatively boring :)
 
I suppose that it could be, but I have no idea what your daily tasks are, 
and I'm not really certain how to go about learning these things. It is probably
Debian specific, so learning Debian's workflow would probably point me in the
right direction.  

It might be very little effort on your part to record a some of your 
daily tasks and show others how easy it is to do these necessary tasks.
When I quit my last job maintaining a website, I made a half hour video
explaining how the site works, where various files are, etc.  I think that
probably made it easier for my predecessor to take over for me.
That's my two cents.

Thanks again for volunteering so much of your time Samuel.  :)

> One the main problems I have is that it almost never happens that when
> I try to upload a new version of gnumach it just builds at all. Because
> we have the 32bit build, the 64bit build, the xen build, etc. and we'd
> like to also have PAE and SMP versions. And then whether it actually
> works. We could probably set up CI etc., help welcome of course.
> 
> Same for libpciaccess & PCI / I/O access for instance, various people
> have had their own goals in modifying it, then broke each other's
> needs. That's not a surprise per se, it's software, it always breaks
> so. But in the end it seems that it's only at the end when I try to
> upload the package that when I put things together I realize that it's
> broken. Xorg's status has been blinking over the past years due to such
> issue.
> 
> I also see the lwip stack that is still unused while for me that's what
> we should aim for. But I haven't seen anybody actually take the time to
> check that it doesn't break testsuites, to see how to change the Debian
> & Guix scripts to replace the linuxish pfinet with it, etc.
> 
>> Who else could take your place?
> 
> Anybody who actually takes time to do the important part: making sure
> that things actually work altogether. It does not even necessarily need
> advanced technical skills, just trying and checking that it works.
> 
>> We should probably have the conversation...how can we make Samuel's
>> job easier?
> 
> By taking it.
> 
> For instance, I see little reviewing of each other's code, while it is
> well-known that this is a very good way of fixing bugs. There are some
> patches on bug-hurd which are still waiting for reviews for litterally
> several years.
> 
> Samuel