Re: question about historical GNU System releases

[Arguri]

Hi,
> 2. Was the GNU System release v0.2 in 1997 the last release or have
> there been any others since?
>   
The Debian/Hurd <Letter><Number> "Releases" are some sort of Snapshots, 
of what currently runs und how certain things are/were done.
> 3. (assuming the answer to #2 is no) The g-s-d archive doe not go back
> to 1997. Does anyone know what happened in 1997 that delayed the
> release schedule and caused the 10 year gap since the last release?
>   
Well, I don't know, but I assume that ams stopped working and Marcus 
appeared and did the things, which turned out to become Debian/Hurd. 
Thomas (BSG) stopped actually doing Hurd related stuff (except for 
helping with design decisions) and Roland only works on Glibc now, as 
far as I know.
Actually there would be (at least thats what ams says) not that much 
difference from a GNU 0.2 release (1997) or a GNU 0.3 release (2007). It 
would include nearly the same amount of packages and the installation 
would be the same. Although many packages would be up to date there 
would be no real difference in system behaviour. You could try to 
install the latest "release" of the GNU System / GNU System Snapshot and 
try to compile the most recent versions of nearly everything, although 
many packages need heavy patching to become useful or even compileable.
Another Point was mentioned by Olaf: GNU Mach 2 (which would have 
included oskit) was abandoned because it caused enough work to let the 
developers say, that GNU Mach 1.x could be fixed and could use newer and 
even better drivers than GNU Mach 2 and still would not require as many 
work as GNU Mach 2 would need. It turned out that the work one needs to 
spend on GNU Mach 1.x is in my eyes nearly the same as for GNU Mach 2 
(or even less, because oskit is now unmaintained and as such the GNU 
Project would need more or less its own fork). GNU Mach 2 for instance 
has serious problems (as 1.x has), but the problems are even more than 
for 1.x because 1.x does run on real Hardware and 2 won't even compile 
with recent Distribution. Only this single point describes one bigger 
cause for the gap you mentioned: One branch was nearly abandoned and 
work was put into the other one until the decision was made, that the 
"newer" branch is useless. Such considerations are surely one, but not 
the most important, cause why there have not been any "offical" Releases 
for 10 years.

Regards,
   Arguri