Greetings, This is a status update for the Debian GNU/Hurd port[1] (for general information about the GNU Hurd, see [2]). While the port was limping along for a couple of years, it has picked up speed again. The current state is still far from being on par with Debian's established Linux ports, but it is mostly up to date and reasonably usable. Improvements over the last year and a half include: * For quite a while now, we have a mostly uptodate (as in, at most a couple of Debian revisions behind) toolchain and most of the core Debian packages are in good shape. * A buildd is up and ready to go, pending its addition to the wanna-build database. In the meantime, Santiago Vila and Michael Banck have been semi-automatically building and uploading hurd-i386 packages. * Several major packages have been ported, though some of them are not in the official archive as they need patches which have not been applied yet. Ported packages include Apache, Qt and much of KDE and GNOME. Further, several important missing features have recently been implemented upstream, like POSIX semaphores and SysV Shared Memory. * Jeff Bailey wrote the crosshurd[3] method of installing Debian GNU/Hurd (as well as other Debian ports) from a Debian system into a new partition which makes the installation of Debian GNU/Hurd much easier. * The packaging of the GNU/Hurd core components (hurd, gnumach, mig) has been switched to team-maintenance using svn.debian.org (pkg-hurd project). Michael Banck, Jeff Bailey and Guillem Jover have been added to the list of uploaders, which has resulted in more frequent releases. The Debian packages are also taking a lead in GNU Hurd development: many of the recent Hurd patches have been incorporated into the Hurd package first to provide a wider testing audience. * Similarly, the coordination of porting has been centralized in an Alioth project, debian-hurd, where patches, tasks and bugs are being tracked. This has considerably increased the productivity of the porting team. * The above was necessary as several more people have stepped in to porting Debian packages to GNU/Hurd and some duplications of effort became apparent. Members of the french HurdFR organization have done much work in this regard, as have individuals including Christoper Bodenstein and Barry deFreese. As stated initially, GNU/Hurd is still far from being comparable to GNU/Linux systems, but at this point, the stability is sufficient such that interested developers should be able to use it with little trouble provided their hardware is supported by GNU Mach (GNU Mach has been basically unmaintained for several years now: it has few drivers, but IDE and many network drivers work reliably). A convenient way to try the Hurd is to check out the GNU/Hurd Live CD provided by Ben Asselstine[4]. There a still a lot of things to do and help is needed. Please contact us at debian-hurd@lists.debian.org if you want to help: * More packages need to be ported. Currently, only around 40% of all Debian packages are built for the Hurd. A lot of the others have portability issues which needs to be addressed, but the current porting team is lacking manpower to do so. People already familiar with Debian development are especially sought after, as we are too few to mentor many people along the way. * Debian-installer needs to be ported. Colin Watson started some work on this a while ago, but other basic things like debootstrap or base-config still need porting as well. * Upstream development of the GNU Hurd is carried out by only a few people in their spare time; help from experienced programmers is always appreciated, especially for enhancing important applications with Hurd-specific features or writing new ones exploiting the Hurd. * Possibly get an official GNU/Hurd debian.org box up and keep it running. Several people are currently running internet-accessible Hurd machines though, so if somebody wants an account in order to do some serious work, please contact us. * An NMU policy for unreleased ports might have to be established in coordination with the release team and other ports, in order to faciliate further development by fixing central Build-Dependencies or otherwise important packages after some time. To summarize, the Debian GNU/Hurd is alive and kicking, though it could need some more help. Other GNU/Hurd ports like Gentoo GNU/Hurd and Bee GNU/Hurd seem to be mostly stalled, so Debian is currently the only distribution actively developing the GNU/Hurd system, thus providing an invaluable service to the Hurd community. enjoy, The Debian GNU/Hurd porters -- [1] http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd [2] http://hurd.gnu.org and http://kerneltrap.org/forums/hurd/kernel [3] http://packages.debian.org/crosshurd [4] http://people.debian.org/~neal/hurd-live-cd/
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