Re: Running the Hurd in qemu possibilities

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Joshua Branson, le mar. 15 sept. 2020 20:48:43 -0400, a ecrit:
> What's our marketing strategy?  Full truth
> about the Hurd's short comings?  Or highlighting its possibilities?

It's Ok to tell about shortcomings. But for bugs that are transient or
easily fixable, or simply unknown to maintainers, or user errors due to
being new to Debian systems, I don't really see the point :)

> https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/0c24fcfd-f7be-4a99-a25d-59df9b0612f7

I have only skimmed over a couple of minutes. It seems like a lot of
small issues. Some of which are known, others aren't.

Which image did you use to install it? For instance, the
uninstallability of the ikiwiki and git packages are odd. Did you run
apt-get update before running apt-get install?

> The video shows that (at least to my knowledge) the latest qemu image
> has some hiccups.
> 
> - It does not automatically set up networking.

? It does when you let the installer use the DHCP configuration. When
you use manual configuration in the installer, it's not working indeed,
that's on some TODO list.

> - Manually setting up networking could be easier (I'll make some wiki edits 
> to correct this)

IIRC setting it up just the Debian way should just be working. If not,
it's no big deal, just a bug to fix in ifupdown.

> - SSH-ing into the machine doesn't work.

Did you set port 22 forwarding?

> - and weird CAPS LOCK errors.  Essentially I somehow enabled CAPS LOCK on the 
> qemu image,
>   and I could not un-CAPS LOCK.

I never saw that kind of issue with the Hurd. I'd rather see an odd
interaction between your window manager and qemu. I have already seen
this kind of stuck modifier issue. Possibly you just need to press the
shift keys, which qemu somehow thought should be kept held.

I don't have time to go through the whole video. I guess it'd rather
be turned into threads on bug-hurd to determine whether they are user
errors, small bugs, or actual shortcomings. Yes, that'll probably be a
lot of TODOs, but just address TODOs, and they'll be gone. And others
will find other TODOs, just like you just did while we already addressed
so many of them already, it's just other things to work on. When people
ask when the Hurd is ready, I answer them that Linux is not ready, there
are still TODOs everywhere, that's only natural for software.

Samuel