Re: Future Direction of GNU Hurd?

[William ML Leslie]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2021 at 05:18, Olaf Buddenhagen <olafbuddenhagen@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 06:00:13PM +1100, William ML Leslie wrote:
>
> > The hurd-ng project, to the extent that there remains a project, is
> > really very open ended.  Any sufficiently motivated person who came
> > along could make whatever they wanted to with it.  As long as they
> > follow the license of any code they use, they can make it into
> > anything they like.  They don't have to agree with the opinions of
> > Shap or myself, they are free to make decisions that would make Thomas
> > Bushnell look down his nose at them, and are free to ignore the
> > opinions of Samuel or Richard.
> [...]
> > But the one thing that stands out to me from the open source community
> > is that every time someone tells you what you should or shouldn't be
> > building, you can feel free to loudly ignore them.
>
> Woah, calm down. Of course you are free -- and generally encouraged --
> to work on any kind of system you like. (As long as you don't call it
> "Hurd"...)
>
> Indeed I'm myself contemplating a design that is inspired by the Hurd in
> some ways, but diverges significantly in others...
>
> Having said that, keep in mind that this list is owned by the Hurd
> project. You are entitled to disagree: but saying that the opinions of
> Hurd developers don't matter, is frankly just rude.
>

You really don't have to satisfy people who have no stake in the
project.  Those who still have authority and an active interest -
namely Samuel T and Ludovic - are very reasonable and are known not to
micromanage anyone who wanted to contribute.

> > nor am I going to justify decisions I've made in a new project I
> > started in September.
>
> Of course you don't have to justify the decisions you make in your own
> project. However, if you are bringing them up on this list, I'd hope you
> would be willing to explain what makes you like one approach over
> another: considering that this is basically the whole point of the
> discussions here...
>

When it is relevant to the point, sure.  I'm just aware it's very easy
to talk a lot about what I should build and never actually build
anything.

> > You can probably tell from my previous email that I'm still kind of
> > mired in low-level nonsense at this point and don't have anything
> > useful to share about it.
>
> Well, I wouldn't call it nonsense... Though for my project, I decided to
> go a different route: mostly focusing on high-level aspects for now --
> only considering lower-level implementation details when they come up
> while thinking about other aspects. And when I'll start the
> implementation, I'll go with low-effort approximations based on existing
> systems first, leaving a native implementation for later.
>
> Of course this way I'm taking a risk that some of the things I'm
> envisioning for the low-level mechanisms turn out not to be viable, and
> I'll have to revamp major aspects of the system... But at least I'm
> avoiding the risk of getting bogged down in low-level details, and never
> getting to the interesting parts -- like so many other projects...
>

That's fair.  I mean, I want to play with user interface concepts, but
I'm unlikely to ever get that far on my own.  Right now I just want to
get to the point where I can develop on a free, reasonably secure, and
transactional system.  I don't want to make any claims past that point
because there's no reason for me to think yet that I'll get to do many
of them.

-- 
William Leslie

Q: What is your boss's password?
A: "Authentication", clearly

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