Re: Mailing List traffic and membership
On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 03:08:07PM -0700, Brent Fulgham wrote:
> > > The graph shows that there is a steadily increasing
> > > interest in the Hurd, and a decreasing amount of time
> > > for people to discuss it :)
> >
> > That's interesting, but what I'm more interested in is the reason
> > why the number of developers doesn't increase, even though so many
> > people subscribe to the list. This is not ironical but a purely
> > academic interest for me.
> >
> I think the following reasons apply:
>
> 1. The ZERO HOLE problem. (Watch your work mysteriously vanish.)
>
> 2. Lack of good developer documentation. This is changing, slowly.
> But it is still hard to figure out where things should be implemented,
> how the pieces of the Hurd fit together, what pieces of the standard
> libraries available under Linux (and other Unix's) are not implemented
> (and if they are not implemented on purpose, or just due to a lack
> of time).
>
> Roland and Thomas do a great job trying to answer questions from all
> of us. Given their limited time it's amazing how much response they
> manage to provide. However, but written documents are more
> long-lasting... ;-)
>
> 3. Lack of leadership. We proceed in a very ad-hoc manner, because
> everyone is busy and we only work on the things that interest us.
> Consequently, people with different hardware are not always supported,
> or certain features are not worked on because they don't really
> matter to us (PPP for example). This is similar to how the Guile
> project was a few months ago, until a new lead maintainer took over.
> I'm not suggesting we do that here (of course), but I think it might
> help if we set some goals to work towards.
>
> Now, none of the above are really problems. We have fun, and we do
> what we can. But it might explain why others aren't jumping on the
> bandwagon? However, it's heartening to see the many new list subscribers.
> :-)
4. Lack of hello-worlds.
BIg hello-worlds archive could convert many hackers to Hurd.
Having to spend two weeks reading sources before making anything
interesting discourages.
5. Lack of PPP.
For most Europeans, PPP is something every OS must have to be usable.
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