Re: How to get more developers (was: Mailing List traffic and...)
On Sat, Jul 15, 2000 at 05:31:25AM +0200, Farid Hajji wrote:
> 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.
>
> Marcus' tar-balls are here a real good starting point for first-time
> users, but it would be even better to provide splitted files for users
> with flaky connections (Marcus?). Actually, with Marcus' help, it is
> much more easy to get the pieces of a working Hurd together and I also
> mean the .debs. Thank you! You're doing a extremely valuable job at this.
>
> Another important missing point is PPP. We really need PPP in the first
> place, so that it is possible to cvsup (or cvs update) current sources
> directly from a running Hurd system. One (probably quick) way to get PPP
> would be to use FreeBSD's _user-level_ ppp(8), which works through a
> tunnel device of the FreeBSD Kernel (an excellent, highly configurable
> and very user friendly tool, IMHO). A fix may be to provide a tunnel
> translator in the sense of FreeBSD, on which ppp(8) could dock. This
> approach may be even compatible with Mach's and the Hurd's philosophy.
> Any takers?
>
> Once we get PPP up and running, it may be a good idea to start
> thinking (and experimenting) with some kind of installation over the
> 'Net (be it PPP or Ethernet). Here again, FreeBSD is a good example of
> how it can be done. Software that just needs one or two boot floppies
> to be downloaded manually and which then pulls itself off the 'Net is
> not only easy to setup, but also very practical in case of catasrophic
> failures etc.
O.K. I would just like to step in here. I emailed the list a while ago (yes
I have been lurking for a while) about what needs to be done and porting ppp
was one of them. My origrnal message was sent sent about doing something for
a course at school (an independent study) and I believe it was Tom Wegrzano who
gave me a list of things to do which include porting pppd.
This is what I have chosen to do (unless of course somebody else is doing it).
So I guess I am going to claim responsibility for this (if that's o.k.). I still
need to familiarize myself with the HURD; it would help to actually get the thing
installed, but I haven't had the time or the disk space to try that yet. I am going
to do something about that real soon.
Also, am I correct in assuming that pfinet is being rewritten because I think the
last time I checked there was a directory called newpfinet in CVS? Any information
from Roland (He's the author, right?) would be helpful.
Dan
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Daniel E. Baumann
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E-mail: baumannd@msoe.edu (preferred)
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"Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code."
-- Dave Olson
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