> Is it likely that there will be an httpfs to go along > with the ftpfs?
To be sure there eventually will be. But noone is working on it, and it is not something we are planning per se. This is the kind of thing that anyone can take up and work on if they want to teach themselves the hurd, and hack freely on without risking the stability of their hurd system. There are enough other things to be done that only those of us with a lot of expert knowledge about the hurd can really do (and aren't very easy to start dabbling in for someone less experienced) that we are likely to focus on those things for the foreseeable near future. > The reason I ask is that it would greatly simplify apt porting if we > could make use of ftp and http file systems. Then it just becomes a > matter of pointing apt's "local" configuration info to either of these > filesystems and setting up proper instructions for "cd'ing" to the > appropriate place on the net. That is a nice idea, but I suspect that it is not in fact the simple way to go. There is not likely to be a whole lot of effort required to get any program that runs on linux and uses the network (sockets) in usual ways ported to the Hurd. For anyone (including Thomas and myself) it is probably easier to get such a program working in its usual ways on the Hurd than to do any substantial work on a new translator or debugging on ftpfs. This is not to say that working on translators is hard--it's just that porting most programs from linux to hurd is really quite easy. Furthermore, there are more complex "design" kind of issues in using a hurd filesystem vs the direct uses of the network that things like apt do now. Until we have a design for giving such hurd filesystems other kinds of features they can't now have, using "plain" apt is probably in fact preferable in terms of functionality. Specifically, apt-get will show you error messages from the ftp/http server, track progress of downloads and show you estimated throughput and download times, etc. We don't currently have even a design really worked out for how an ftpfs/httpfs would deliver that kind of information to users.
