debinst: native hurd installer
Ive been playing with the Hurd, and talking to a few people (notably
Marcus Brinkmann whose cc'ed), i have a few comments id like to make
here.
We were hoping to install the Hurd from a Linux installer, i.e. install
everything under linux, then reboot into the hurd and do anything Hurd
specific then.
The Hurd has some notable differences to the way linux needs to be
prepared.
The Hurd uses translator protocols to be able to understand different
things, i.e. there are translators for network interfaces and to read
compressed gzip'ed files (there are more, but i still have limited
knowledge)
The Hurd doesnt use linux kernel style modules at all.
The Hurd has no use for hardware detection, it either works or it
doesnt, but i guess the hardware present
will determine wether translators need to be used, and what
configuration they will need.
They will need to use grub as a bootloader.
Currently the easiest way to install the hurd is to unpack a ~20MB (i
think) tarball and then a general purpose configuration script is ran
that configures... stuff.... (im in the dark a bit here).
There is the cross-install method of installing it as well which i
havent tried.
I get the feeling that any help is very much appreciated, if we came up
with a way to install hurd from linux then they would indeed be happy,
but they wouldnt consider it to be a finished product, they would feel
the need to hack at it untill it is a native Hurd installer. (maybe im
being too judgmental here)
I dont think making a native hurd installer would be much more
difficult, i started to have a go at converting busybox, and i think
much of it will work without much effort. Slang, ae, wget and dpkg (of
course) are already supported, thats about all thats on the root disk as
i remember.
I will play around with busybox more today.
Glenn
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