Re: GSoC ideas

[Manolis Ragkousis]

Hello everyone,

As I am still a student I would like to suggest continuing the project
of porting Guix to GNU/Hurd in this GSoC as well, with the objective of
having a working GuixSD/Hurd by the end of the summer.

After discussions with Justus and Samuel in FOSDEM about the Guix-Hurd
port I am starting to have a good idea on what is left to be done and
the solution needed for the problems we have.

So here's a preliminary timeline as well as a list of things to be done:

Before May:

1) Merge wip-hurd branch.
2) Make the daemon handle chroot builds on the Hurd.
Note here that on the Hurd, one does not need to be root to achieve
isolation, so I should change the daemon to use this capability.
3) Instead of using the Linux syscall guile wrappers, I should modify
Guix to use a more Hurdish way (i.e settrans) so later on we can handle
translators and bootstrap a GNU/Hurd system.
4) Better understand how GuixSD startup works.

May-August:
1) Implement the mechanisms for creating and mounting the initial
filesystem and starting the system.
2) Implement the mechanisms to handle the Hurd servers in /hurd. I
remember I was told that there may be an issue when the servers are not
actually there (i.e all the binaries are in the /gnu/store). Would love
if somebody could tell us more on that.
3) Isolate Linuxisms around Guix.
4) David Michael has made an excelent work on getting Shepherd working
with Hurd so I don't think we will have any serious issues with the init
daemon.
5) Others that will come up.. In the following weeks I will work closely
with the Hurd guys to make sure we get a better understanding of
everything and a detailed timeline.

End of GSoC:
Have a working GuixSD with Hurd as the kernel.

Currently Justus (and others soon :-)) are testing Guix on their
machines. We have some issues but we are working on them.

Please feel free to add/correct anything from the above. Your
comment/opinion may help to get things up and running faster :-)

Finally I want to say that I will continue my work on this, regardless
of GSoC or not, but I would like it if it was. :-)

Thank you,
Manolis