Hello Shinichi, On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 08:28:03PM +0900, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote: > Thank you for your invitation to help development on the HURD. I would like > to try, but there are few things that are holding me back: > > - I have quite a strong background in programming for numerical analysis, > things like finite element method and (large) systems of differential > equations. I consider myself fluent in FORTRAN, LaTeX and Python but I have > little to no experience with C
Sounds like we have a similar background :) > - I can definitely bring myself up to a level where I can bring a positive > contribution to GNU/HURD, but the question is how much time I'd have to > invest, in other words, I expect it would take a (very) long time before I > could become really productive > > - I am also reluctant because of the experimental nature of this software. > I am not sure I want to spend my time on something that will never reach > the level of actual application. I have spent 17 years of my life as a > professor working on things that are mostly irrelevant and useless, and now > I want to spend my time on things that are actually useful. I can understand your reservations. Ultimately it is your evaluation to make. The number of developers is small, so there is some chance that individual contributions are significant. But it does take time to learn and be productive. > If I were to "join the team", what kind of work are we talking about? Is it > feasible to write a complete USB driver, or something with sound? It is a free software project, so you get to choose what you want to work on ;) I think developing a USB stack would be very useful (I believe the idea would be to adapt work from NetBSD), but probably on the higher tier of difficulty. The following page lists a number of well defined projects useful in the short term: https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/contributing/ There are things to be done within Debian as well (this is a Debian mailing-list after all), there is work to be done on porting different software to work in the Hurd. Perhaps porting different scientific software in Debian to the Hurd would be a good way to learn. The FORTRAN compiler should work, I don't know if there are particular challenges in porting FORTRAN software to the Hurd. Other people in the list may have other suggestions. Regards, João
