Re: hurd installed, now what?
The thing I would like to see someone do is work on rpctrace. It is
currently in a state that's very useful if you happen to know all of the
RPC msgid numbers by heart (no, I don't). Hacking on rpctrace is a good
way to learn about the Hurd and about Mach IPC, and making it better is an
excellent way to help other people learn about the Hurd by giving them a
powerful expository tool.
I have already done enough work on rpctrace that you can hack on it without
knowing much about Mach IPC (just don't mess with the structural parts of
the code), or even really needing to learn much about it in the process.
What it needs is some straightforward programming to give it symbolic
output where it now has lots of numbers, and perhaps some other kinds of
helpful intelligence. But just doing something clean and sane for giving
it tables of number->name mappings based on the .defs files would be a
great start.
You can take the source file hurd/utils/rpctrace.c from the Hurd source
tree and compile it on its own if you don't want to try building the whole
Hurd from scratch. That file is a standalone program, just compile
it with: cc -o rpctrace -g rpctrace.c -lports -lihash -lthreads.
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