On Wednesday 24 March 2010 07:14:37 Jérémie Koenig wrote: > Hello, > > As part of my preparation for porting debian-installer to the Hurd (as > a Debian GSoC project),
Why? > I'm not sure whether non-Linux support in general, and Hurd support in > particular, is a priority as far as your project is concerned, however > I would be grateful if you could review those and consider including > them. It's really up to Denys, but... why Hurd? I honestly don't understand why anyone, anywhere, would care about that project anymore. There are plenty of non-Linux projects I can understand people being interested in, but you have to dig down a long, long way to get to The Hurd. Starting with the more interesting stuff (and skipping the closed source stuff entirely): Darwin would be pretty interesting, because that's MacOS X. If I ever wind up getting a Mac (which I've been vaguely planning to do ever since GPLv3 came out, but haven't done yet), I may port it myself. Lots of users, and the iPhone is huge. (Ok, it's only interesting because of a closed source thing built on top of it, but still.) Various "bare metal" variants like newlib/libgloss take the embedded thing and run with it. The Linux kernel _is_ currently a megabyte with "allnoconfig", wanting to run on the bare metal is an understandable impulse, and a lot of people do "boot to ELF and have libc talk to the hardware". It's generally single process nommu, but we've already got some rudimentary nofork support in the shell. Android has significant corporate backing (even if they've stupidly paintained themselves into a corner as far as the Linux community is concerned, which is probably going to come back and bite them hard in a year or two). The tweaks to support android are slightly _less_ stupid than SELinux support (which is definitely damning with faint praise). Minix at least has a reason to exist (it's a teaching tool, intentionally kept small enough that you can read and understand its entire source code in a single semester). If they were interested in using busybox source for educational purposes, I could see somebody maintaining a port. (Hey, students cleaning up our code for readability. We could do worse.) FreeBSD probably comes next, although the interest is definitely starting to flag by now. On the plus side it might share a lot of code with MacOS X. On the minus side, it will never amount to anything because every time a BSD- licensed OS gets any sort of commercial viability it has its senior developers hired away to work on some proprietary fork by whoever's trying to cash in on it this week, and its open source community then spends a decade rebuilding. (Examples: Sun hiring Bill Joy in 1982 to work on SunOS, BSDI hiring the remains of the CSRG around 1990 to do a proprietary BSD/386 and thus derailing Bill Jolitz' open source work for a fairly critical couple years, Apple hiring Jordan Hubbard and such to work on MacOS X around 1998...) Maybe the fourth (fifth?) time's the charm, but BSD is actually _less_ popular today than it was a quarter-century ago, and it's hard to get particularly excited about that. (It also isn't used much in the embedded world, either.) OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, and so on are similar but less interesting than FreeBSD because even fewer people actually use them anymore. OpenBSD had to do a "save us from going under or we'll take OpenSSL with us" begathon a few years ago, NetBSD was declared moribund by one of its founders, and Dragonfly was apparently started rather than participate in any of the other existing projects. Still, people submit patches from time to time. OpenSolaris is less interesting than any of the above, since its userbase largely seems to consist of people like Jorg Schilling who hate each other, the Project Indiana status page was last updated in 2008 and I'm not sure what their direction is supposed to be now, and now with Oracle having bought the sucker its future would be in doubt even if it hadn't been essentially stillborn. _All_ of that is more interesting than The Hurd. The hurd has never been used to actually do anything, that I am aware of. It's never even been a serious basis for research, it's not a teaching tool, it has no production niche on desktop, server, embedded, supercomputing... It exists because Richard Stallman has a massive "not invented here" thing going on with both Linux _and_ BSD. He wanted to respond to AT&T's license change back in 1983, made an incredibly bad technical decision rewriting the monolithic alix kernel into a microkernel (see the tanenbaum-torvalds debate for why that's a bad idea for anything _other_ than a teaching tool), and twenty years later he refuses to admit that the project _died_ in the late 80's. It's like one of those people living with the mummified corpse of a relative and pretending they're still alive. It's embarassing. Now I admit it's hard to kill an open source project. FreeDOS development is still active, the ELKS project ported Linux (more or less) to the 16-bit 8086, Haiku is doing a decent job of cloning BeOS, AROS is trying hard to clone AmigaOS, and so on. Presumably all this is for the same reason there are multiple emulators for the MITS Altair, and an actively developed multitasking operating system for the commdore 64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeckOS But given a choice between The Hurd vs Geckos, the latter seems like a slightly more interesting project... Rob -- Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
