Hi,
2. Was the GNU System release v0.2 in 1997 the last release or have
there been any others since?
The Debian/Hurd <Letter><Number> "Releases" are some sort of Snapshots,
of what currently runs und how certain things are/were done.
3. (assuming the answer to #2 is no) The g-s-d archive doe not go back
to 1997. Does anyone know what happened in 1997 that delayed the
release schedule and caused the 10 year gap since the last release?
Well, I don't know, but I assume that ams stopped working and Marcus
appeared and did the things, which turned out to become Debian/Hurd.
Thomas (BSG) stopped actually doing Hurd related stuff (except for
helping with design decisions) and Roland only works on Glibc now, as
far as I know.
Actually there would be (at least thats what ams says) not that much
difference from a GNU 0.2 release (1997) or a GNU 0.3 release (2007). It
would include nearly the same amount of packages and the installation
would be the same. Although many packages would be up to date there
would be no real difference in system behaviour. You could try to
install the latest "release" of the GNU System / GNU System Snapshot and
try to compile the most recent versions of nearly everything, although
many packages need heavy patching to become useful or even compileable.
Another Point was mentioned by Olaf: GNU Mach 2 (which would have
included oskit) was abandoned because it caused enough work to let the
developers say, that GNU Mach 1.x could be fixed and could use newer and
even better drivers than GNU Mach 2 and still would not require as many
work as GNU Mach 2 would need. It turned out that the work one needs to
spend on GNU Mach 1.x is in my eyes nearly the same as for GNU Mach 2
(or even less, because oskit is now unmaintained and as such the GNU
Project would need more or less its own fork). GNU Mach 2 for instance
has serious problems (as 1.x has), but the problems are even more than
for 1.x because 1.x does run on real Hardware and 2 won't even compile
with recent Distribution. Only this single point describes one bigger
cause for the gap you mentioned: One branch was nearly abandoned and
work was put into the other one until the decision was made, that the
"newer" branch is useless. Such considerations are surely one, but not
the most important, cause why there have not been any "offical" Releases
for 10 years.
Regards,
Arguri
