Re: about GNU Hurd

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

       If we are sure we need HURD-NG, it is no-sense to work in Hurd
       on gnumach anymore. To ask people to work in Hurd on gnumach is
       then to ask hackers to work in something that wont be useful.

   That's too strong a statement.  To work on a short-term version and
   a long-term version in parallel is not absurd.  I think that people
   do lots of work on the stable version of Linux while others do work
   on preparing the next one.

The difference is that between Linux N and N+1, the changes are
minimal and very incremental.  The Hurd and Hurd-NG will have no
similarities at all other than the name.

   But the Mach-based version of the Hurd is not stable, and not much in
   use.  If we can make it good to use, in the next year or so, that will
   be worth while.  But perhaps not easy or not feasible.

Richard, the Mach based version of the Hurd is indeed quite stable
(and has been for quite a few years), it is not as stable as
GNU/Linux, but it is quite usable.  The things that are mostly lacking
are:

0) drivers
1) >2GiB file systems
2) drivers

Point 1 is done, but still has not been commited to the CVS tree.  0/1
are much harder, since there are so many drivers to port, and so many
types of drivers.

But stability wise, you could even run it on your laptop and be quite
happy.

   The servers of Hurd-NG will be made from the existing Hurd servers, so
   developing them is still part of the main line of development.

This is simply not true, Hurd-NG will be so vastly different that
there won't be any code reuse.  Hurd-NG is even supposed to discard
POSIX compatibility, which will be implemented seperatly on top of the
new system; last time I heard, things might have changed since then.
But this is exactly it, things change all the time, and nobody knows
what is going on.