Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > There were such people, I am/was one of those people.  My
   > personal feeling is that L4 is cool, but Mach is simply more
   > feasible to get to a point where it would be useful and decent.

   Then work on that.  I don't think anyone is telling you what to do
   here.

I'm not willing to invest my spare time in something that might never
be used again (Hurd/Mach?), nor am I willing to invest my spare time
in something that will never see day light (Hurd/L4?).  And that
nobody is telling me, a person who has been around for a while, what
the heck one should invest their time in is the major problem.

You make it sound as the choice is trivial, yet you write in a mail
that is only a few minutes older:

   Work on the L4 codebase is valuable in my opinion; work on the Mach
   codebase is valuable.  They are both valuable in different ways,
   and I think that there is not a good reason to regard them as so
   separable.

If the only thing that one might be able to be used from Hurd/Mach's
code base is libihash, then I really fail to see how one shouldn't
consider them seperate for good reasons; not being compatible at all
is quite a good reason and spending time on two projects that try to
be the GNU kernel at the same time is another one.  We don't have
enough people to keep GCC working on the Hurd, why would you think
that we have enough people to maintain two code bases that have only
the name in common?

Cheerio!