On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, Grigorio V. Moshkin wrote: > [...] > So Debian GNU/HURD MUST NOT differ at all compared to Debian GNU/Linux for > 'external user'. It's a wrong way to port packages such as make, tar, etc. > from Linux to HURD. Instead you have to create environment that couldn't > be distinguished from Linux by any Linux packages, programs or modules!
And who said otherwise? :-) There exist already a common environment for GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd. It's called glibc2 (i.e. GNU libc, version 2). Since, by this time, all current GNU/Linux distributions (Debian, Red-Hat, etc.) are already based in glibc2 (a.k.a. libc6), porting things to GNU/Hurd is already easy. BTW: Maybe this is just a little misunderstanding, but we are not "porting" make, tar, etc. "from Linux" to Hurd. For now, we are just recompiling the Debian source packages for Hurd. All the Debian source packages for GNU applications (like the ones you mentioned: make, tar, etc.) are based on the GNU source packages, they just differ in minor things, but the modifications are almost always portable enough. (We have reports that many Debian packages do even compile under Solaris :-). So don't worry, we expect that GNU/Hurd not to differ too much from GNU/Linux. Binary compatibility with Linux is also in the todo list for GNU/Hurd. (So you will be able to run Linux binaries without even recompiling them), but we need volunteers, since this is a difficult task ;-) Thanks. -- "b95d275090e4c01e33d1bc7bdcf46e1f" (a truly random sig)
