Hi, On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 08:23:57AM +0300, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> And I think I can remember somebody from the Hurd community having > tried to show the advantage of the Hurd way and ran into an attitude > like: ``Why do we need a Hurd, if we already have FUSE?'' :-( Indeed this is a problem -- translators were the most visible advantage of the Hurd archtecture; and now that FUSE covers most of the obvious use cases, it's much harder to sell then before... In my latest Hurd talk, I didn't even try presenting translators as a feature on its own. Rather, I just explained them as an element of the extensible VFS concept -- which is part of the Hurd's fundamental idea of a user-extensible system environment. (And the one I covered in most detail of course, as it's the most evident part, with the most examples available.) I mentioned FUSE only as one example of how things that require extensible kernel support on other systems, can be implemented as simple unprivileged userspace components with Hurd's extensible VFS -- along with other examples like LVM, loopback devices, unionmount, and namespace-based translator selection. While one or two people told me that the presentation was interesting, I have no idea whether I was able to convince anyone about the advantages of the Hurd architecture... Unfortunately most of it is very abstract -- we definitely need more tangible examples :-( -antrik-
