Re: about GNU Hurd

[Xavier Maillard]

      > Why the FSF or the GNU project does not designate a project
      > leader ? Why is there no visibility on this project for any
      > external eye ? What about an official *up to date* website (with
      > all needed informations to attract new hackers) ? ...

      I also think so. to me it seems like Hurd not important to GNU
      Project, so i stopped reading Hurd User Guide and playing with Hurd
      on Qemu. it is pretty much experience of mine that Hurd has
      organizational problems and till then they are solved it will not
      make any difference to work on technical side. 

   I agree in that the Hurd project has some organizational issues. But,
   just my oppinion, those issues maily comes from a lack of capable
   hackers, and from a lack of _actual_ work. There are many people
   reading the Hurd User Guide, the Hurd Hacking Guide, the OSF Mach
   books, etc. But, how many people you know that is able to actually
   hack gnumach? From these mach-capable hackers, how many of them are
   _actually_ hacking gnumach?

The lack of knowledge justifies the lack of skilled people. Very
few people just know what the Hurd is and its internals.
Whatsover, as I told it, there is no easy way to just know what
to do and how to do it well. In other words, nobody can easily
get access to valuable knowledge to work on the Hurd. This is
more important than just an organizational problem.

Each time I tried to get interest in the Hurd, things were
changing (l4, gnumach, coyotos, etc.). Due to lack of a « kind
dictator », project lacks directions on what things should be
done. Plus there are big dissentions between project members so
that's really hard to stay on the project.

   Many more lines complaining about the state of the Hurd project has
   been written than lines of code trying to solve it.

I agree with that.

   Still, there are organizational problems. I think the project need a
   refresh. I would appoint Thomas Schwinge as the unique maintainer for
   both the Hurd and gnumach. He seems to be the most active hacker doing
   real work. He seems to enjoy working in the actual Hurd kernel (not in
   HurdNG or something like that). He could make a new website updated
   with clear directions and development procedures in
   http://hurd.gnu.org. etc.

   I would politely ask Brinkman, Bushnell and Neal to pass the baton to
   him. They seem to be working in other projects such as HurdNG, that is
   not the Hurd anymore since the basic design has changed. 

Lucky you, there is at least someone that knows the basic design
behind the Hurd ;) What I think must be clearly told is this:
will gnumach survive or not ? There were so many (controversial)
things said about this that I still do not know what the real
status is. When I first began to (try to) code on the Hurd
project, gnumach was closed to be dropped for L4. Then I started
to read on L4 and I saw L4 would have been also dropped for
something else. Hard to stay motivated given the facts that OS
programming skills are hard to acquire and so are informations
about each of these micro-kernels, in the end I felt like a dumb.

So I totally agree we should follow one and only one leader and
just do the work.

   I may be wrong, so just my oppinion :)

This is your opinion and we _must_ respect it :)

        Xavier
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