On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 09:29:59AM +0200, Andreas L. Gustafsson wrote: > > OK, I have often read that getting Hurd to run on top of many different > microkernels is one main goal. I guess it is still focused on mach > then? Probably a good at idea at this time. >
There is (was?) an effort to get the Hurd to run on top of L4 (see http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd), which seems to be on hold atm because the Hurd source itself relies heavily on Mach. (...) > No, I don't think there are anything "wrong" with dpkg, but I have a hard > time getting used to it. Since I know think might not be the best forum > (are there another at all?) I asked for any sources of information to be > mailed to me, thus not cluttering up this list. > Well, I had only been using RPM-based Linux distibutions before I tried out the Hurd, so I can understand how dpkg can seem confusing to you at first. OTOH, if you keep on learning how to use it, I think you will find that there isn't anything that makes rpm better than plain dpkg ; anything that can be done with rpm can also be done with dpkg. There isn't so much to learn to be able to use dpkg for debs installing either. Trying out the Hurd got me to learn about apt and to switch to Debian for my GNU/Linux work ; IMHO apt-get and friends are clearly superior to anything RPM-based. OK the Hurd cannot yet benefit from the mighty apt, but I'm sure it will work in the future... I think you have a point with your popularity argument. The Hurd would clearly benefit from having more users. But OTOH, there is quite a lot of learning involved before you can contribute anything even vaguely useful to the Hurd ; I still haven't found enough time to do this myself. I don't think that people who are put off by a different packaging system can really help (please don't take this as a flame against yourself ; I understand how dpkg can be confusing at first). Free software contributors are volunteers ; IMO nobody has the right to tell them what they "must" decide to work on, even if it results in duplicate efforts. But the Hurd gets very little brain time, so its few contributors'd rather concentrate on the most "important" issues. I fail to see how having a non-RPM packaging system can be considered an "important" issue, so I doubt such a project would get much support. PS : would help-hurd be more relevant for this discussion ? I wasn't sure so I decided to reply here. -- David
