Hurd Traffic

Jeff Bailey Oystein Viggen

Several weeks ago, Jeff Bailey had said that libc0.3 had been accepted upstream and that now buildd was working.

Grant Bowman has offered to see if he can take these status reports and keep part of the Twiki updated so that there's a continuing list of packages that are known to fail.

Before the release of Woody, the stats page only included release architectures. As we are now (thankfully) past that stage, Oystein Viggen reminded Jeff to follow this up so that Hurd package statistics are also displayed (as of writting, they are not).

Phil Charles reported: The J floppies, debian-cd and baseHurd are all working, although not as well as the H3 series. I am now at the fiddling stage to get everything working as well as I can. [...] If there are no problems I will produce jigdo templates as well.

Phil went on to say:

I am drawing a boundary here. I will produce the template and let others work out how to use it. There are three sources that IMHO that will need to be used:

sid, from an ftp site. (Frozen at the date of the CD build?)
alpha.gnu.org (when it is rebuilt)
loop mounted images for boot-floppies etc.

E.O.T.

Marcus Brinkmann

In replying to a question about porting the linux kernel to the Hurd, Jeff Bailey questioned its utility: The question is: What would you like to get out of doing it? It's would probably be an interesting exersize, but wouldn't really further Hurd development all that much.

Mention was made of user-mode L4 microkernel. Marcus Brinkmann replied that if the Hurd has L4 as a microkernel, then one can also have a Linux-based single server in parallel with the Hurd on top of L4. Neil Walfield tidied up saying Of course, there are a variety of issues here. The foremost being hardware sharing. Once that problem is solved, it should be possible with a bit of effort.

Those interested in the L4 Hurd port should also see this kerneltrap.org article (and references thereof).

POSIX

Replying to the (often asked) question "what documentation should be read by a newcomer to the Hurd?", Wolfgang Jährling replied: http://hurd.gnu.org/ and http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/. You will find a lot of useful information there, like how to submit patches, how to port packages and so on.

Marcus Brinkmann added:

Unfortunately, the learning curve is very, very steep. However, there are many tasks along the road that don't require a full understanding of everything. There is very little documentation, I am sorry. Large contributions to the Hurd not only require a thorough understanding of several programming principles, but also a good idea of what the Hurd design is about (which requires a lot of knowledge about POSIX, but also other operating system design ideas).

So, the best way is to take it one step at a time. In using the Hurd, you will certainly find programs that have not been ported yet. You will find small features that are lacking. You will wonder about why something was done in a certain way which you might thing could be done differently. And then you do some work, or ask some clever questions. It's a long way, but useful contributions are not at the end of that way. They are along the way, everywhere a step aside of the learning road.

[Re: CVS access problems] We are in the middle of serious mayhem, sorry. Currently the problems are in glibc. I hope we will soon make progress on that matter.

Jeff Bailey Marcus Brinkmann

There was discussion between Marcus Brinkmann, Jeff Bailey and Roland McGrath about building glibc without glibc headers.

Marcus said that if you do:

$ make install-headers no_deps=t

in the configured Hurd sources, you get errors because certain header files are not found (bits/utsname.h).

Roland replied: Ah! This is new, and it's my fault. Previously all headers the Hurd installed were simple files to be copied. Now trivfs has some headers that are mig-generated, and you can't do mig generation without a proper full set of headers installed. I think what we should do is have install-headers, or a differently-named new target, install just the plain headers and not the generated ones. Or it might be sufficient just to do make install-headers in the hurd subdir to build libc.

Marcus said that he would try it.