Hurd Traffic #64 For 25 Oct 2000

By Zack Brown

Mach 4 | Hurd Servers | Debian Hurd Home | Debian Hurd FAQ | Debian Hurd Mailing List | Hurd Reference Manual | Hurd Installation Guide | Cross-Compiling GNUMach | Hurd Hardware Compatibility Guide

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Mailing List Stats For This Week
• Threads Covered

  1.	17 Oct 2000 - 20 Oct 2000	(7 posts)	'debconf' In The Hurd
  2.	19 Oct 2000	(1 post)	Still Squashing Bugs Before GRUB 1.0
  3.	20 Oct 2000 - 21 Oct 2000	(4 posts)	Woody To Include The Hurd?
  4.	21 Oct 2000	(2 posts)	Status Of PPP

Introduction

Want to help write KC Debian Hurd? See the KC Authorship page the KC Debian Hurd homepage, and the Thread Summary FAQ. Send any questions to the KCDevel mailing list.

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 89 posts in 316K.

There were 36 different contributors. 14 posted more than once. 14 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

• 15 posts in 60K by Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
• 10 posts in 35K by Robert Bihlmeyer <robbe@orcus.priv.at>
• 8 posts in 27K by Steve Bowman <sbowman@frostwork.net>
• 7 posts in 24K by Neal H Walfield <neal@cs.uml.edu>
• 7 posts in 21K by Marc Singer <elf@buici.com>
• Full Stats

1. 'debconf' In The Hurd

17 Oct 2000 - 20 Oct 2000 (7 posts) Archive Link: "debconf"

People: Marcus Brinkmann, Robert Bihlmeyer, Steve Bowman

Steve Bowman reported successfully building 'debconf'. Among other problems he'd had, he said he'd had to set the path with 'export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`/Client', which seemed to be required. Marcus Brinkmann replied, "Uh, this would be a bug." And Robert Bihlmeyer targetted, "debconf build-depends on debconf-utils which depends on debconf, again. I'll ask on debian-devel if this is legal." Steve explained, "Well, they have the same source, but debconf build-depends on debconf-utils, so it's really a self-dependency. It's not really "illegal" AFAIK, but the developer's reference says not to do this (8.1 - this is the section on being kind to porters). There's nothing about this that I can find in the policy or packaging manuals." Marcus agreed this was ugly, but felt it could be safely ignored, and Robert added, "Fortunately, debconf 0.4 went through major restructuring and the evil dependency is now gone. Thanks to Joey for that!"

2. Still Squashing Bugs Before GRUB 1.0

19 Oct 2000 (1 post) Archive Link: "GRUB 0.5.96.1 is released; WE LIED"

Topics: Bootloaders, FS: devfs

People: Gordon Matzigkeit

Gordon Matzigkeit announced:

3. Woody To Include The Hurd?

20 Oct 2000 - 21 Oct 2000 (4 posts) Archive Link: "Hurd Roadmap for Woody Release"

People: Glenn McGrath, Marcus Brinkmann, Philip Charles

Marcus Brinkmann posted a list of things (derived from email exchange with Anthony Towns) that would need to be done in order to release the next version of Debian Hurd side by side with a stable Woody. But he stressed that there was no need to decide right away whether this would be a good thing or not; he only published the list so folks could understand what would be involved if they chose to aim for it.

• boot floppies, to allow an automated, fairly standard installation procedure. Marcus didn't know how much more work this would require, as he wasn't familiar with what work was being done on boot floppies, but he figured there was still some distance to go. Glenn McGrath said:

  From what i know, the biggest problem with a native hurd installer is partitioning.

  The boot-floppies currently and most likely for woody also uses libfdisk, its a small (20K) partitioning program. (see http://cvs.debian.org/boot-floppies/utilities/libfdisk/)

  Marcus replied that if partitioning was the biggest problem, he'd be happy. Of 'libfdisk', he added, "Well, it's of course full of linuxisms, but we can give it a try."

• debian-cd support. Marcus summarized,
  Philip Charles had some success here. Unfortunately, I had not yet the time to improve the cooperation so that Phil can concentrate on the CD issues as opposed to genuine Hurd issues, but it seems that the current way is a mixture of vanilla Debian scripts and the existing install scripts for the Hurd.
• an autobuilder that kept uptodate with most packages, and someone to fix or work around the rest. Marcus said this would be under control soon, and gave a link to the Turtle autobuilder pages at sourceforge.
• All relevant parts of Debian's 'standard' section of packages, ported to the Hurd. Marcus said that in this area the Hurd already shone well, and also had a number of important 'optional' packages such as 'X' and 'gnome'. Only heavily Linux-specific packages were missing, as far as he knew.
• Networking and security would have to be improved, and Marcus said that this would require a lot of changes in the upstream code to the various packages.
  So, a big minus point here, if you want.
  He added,
  overall security is probably quite low, because too few eyes are pondering it. This can only get better with more people poking around, so if we release it, it must be made clear that this is at the core a completely different system with a much different (read: worse) security footprint. We can probably not say much about it except shortly before the final decision has to be made.

4. Status Of PPP

21 Oct 2000 (2 posts) Archive Link: "ppp in hurd"

People: Daniel E. Baumann

J Scott Jaderholm asked about the status of PPP in the Hurd. Daniel E. Baumann replied, "Marcus has written a tunnel interface for the pfinet server. I have now started to port BSD user space PPP. So it will be coming soon :)."

Sharon And Joy