Hi all, Allow me to give a bit of a back story. In was a student (Applied Physics) in the late 1990s. That was the time of the first Pentium CPUs and Windows 3.11 / Windows for Workgroups. I had several friends who were very much into computers, hardware, software, etc. Personally I was not very impressed and as a student I did not have a computer.
I did my graduation research on a Sun workstation running SunOS, using mainly Matlab and LaTeX. That was my first experience with computers. Others in the research group used something exotic called "NeXTstep", others used Silicon Graphics computers which had their own OS. Somewhat later I started working on a VAX / VMS machine, and "at home" I was using an old IBM PS/2 machine running Slackware. This was also the period in which various versions of Windows became available in short succession (95 / 98 / NT / ME / XP / ...). And on the internet people were discussing this new thing, called GNU MACH/HURD. This was 2001 - 2002. Somewhat bewildered about all these OS, I wanted to learn more and I read Tanenbaum's Minix book, which introduced me to the concept of micro-kernel. I also read a book called "Computation Structures" which covers the basic of electronic circuits to perform calculations. To be honest, I am somewhat disappointed with MACH/HURD. About 30 years of development and no penetration into the "mainstream" computer market. As with pop groups: if you cannot break through within a reasonable time, you never will. I am afraid that this applies also to MACH/HURD. But: I am willing to give it a try, if anything it will improve my skills and knowledge and that is always a good thing. Cheers, Shinichi On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 6:15 AM João Pedro Malhado <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Voitek and Shinichi, > > On Thu, Feb 05, 2026 at 01:56:55PM +0100, Wojciech Aniszewski wrote: > > Other idea: I'm also not sure about the status of some Python libs used > widely in science, you know, NumPy and friends. Maybe that needs some work. > IMHO understanding the whole Debian flowchart (packaging, maintaining, > up/downstream, who does what etc.) might be harder than programming... > > > > NumPy, which as you say is important for all the scientific python stuff, > is not building at the moment > https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=numpy > because python-psutil needs porting for the Hurd > https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=python-psutil > > I cannot judge the difficulty of porting python-psutils, but is quite > relevant > work. > > Best wishes, > João >
