I would like to make a public request that the hurd development team provide better access to their mailing list archives and their current development state. I'm posting it here (debian-hurd) first to solicit feedback from the other Debian volunteers as to whether this is appropriate or not.
I have visited their "development" directory and their "current" mailing list archives, and find that both are stagnant as of 8 months ago (for the mailing lists) and about 3 months ago (for the hurd/gnumach ftp site). We are told that development has continued "at a private server", but we aren't given access to any of this. If we are going to produce a hurd distribution, I would like to be working from the latest patched version. If all they want is a debianized distribution of the gnu-0.2 archive, we can do that. However, I feel like it's a waste of time. Based on my experience (minimal) using the hurd distribution, there are serious performance and stability issues. I realize that this is a relatively new kernel, and that some leeway is warranted, but there are non-trivial issues with port-leaking that made it impossible (at least for me) to compile ncurses (a fairly small library) natively under gnu-0.2. Perhaps some of these things have been fixed in the current release, but I can't get the contents of Gord's GHHK disks to work with the gnu-0.2 distribution and so I can't tell. I am starting to question whether the hurd, in the gnu-0.2 state, is worth packaging. Most people wishing to use a packaged binary distribution will be expecting more stability than I am currently experiencing. I think that with current snapshots we might see some better resource handling. Does anyone else have comments on this? Thanks, -Brent -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
