Re: How to get more developers (was: Mailing List traffic and...)
Am Sam, 15 Jul 2000 05:31:25 Farid Hajji Sie:
> Hi Okuji,
>
> > 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.
> first of all, we need some kind of early release (or pre-release, if you
> prefer to call it so) that could be burned on a CD-R! Getting all those
> .debs over a modem link is not only awful, but in some countries really
> expensive. And I'm not yet talking about the difficulties in getting
> accurate and actual informations about the needed packages.
A release is also a good thing to attract people. It can be announced
and
the released software gets attention.
The problem is that you must release something that works reasonable
well.
The Hurd was in a very good condition about one year ago. It was very
stable,
and has shaked out. Now, we face a couple of deep-going changes in the
file system server and network server. Those changes were absolutely
necessary,
first because the file system format was extended, second because the
network
code contained old linux code which didn't compile with the latest gcc.
But those changes have destabilized the Hurd (probably in unexpected
ways).
What you (everyone) can do is to debug the Hurd. This is the single most
important thing. All bugs must go :)
There is the zero hole bug. This is probably only for a couple of
people.
We had some internal discussion, and I will try to write something up
and
send it to the list to inform you all about the things we found out.
The problem is that I am not sure we have identified all of the
problems.
There is the pfinet server. It is unstable, and it is very easy to
provoke
a bug. Everyone with a supported network card, a recompiled hurd with
debugging symbols (I will produce a hurd-dbg next week or so for those
who can't recompile the hurd), and gdb can try to attack this.
We can't even think about a release before those problems are fixed.
> Another important missing point is PPP.
I need PPP, too, and have gathered some knowledge about writing
translators
in the past weeks. However, I am not sure I am up to the task, and there
are more pressing things in the way (see above). When so many people
need PPP,
and quite some have announced to work on this, it is useful for those
people
to join up and work together on it! Everyone who wants or wanted to
write a
PPP server for the Hurd, let's join up and do it together.
We should follow the design ideas by Thomas and Roland on this, btw.
> One unfortunate point is currently IMHO that the docs are suggesting,
> that a Linux system may be necessary to install the Hurd (you know,
> mke2fs etc...).
We need fdisk, or there is no way to create a Hurd partition from Hurd
boot disks. When we have fdisk, I can continue on the boot disk work.
Thanks for your many good ideas,
Marcus
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