RPM-based Hurd distro (was : Re: Hurd F1 ISO and booting)
On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 09:29:59AM +0200, Andreas L. Gustafsson wrote:
>
> OK, I have often read that getting Hurd to run on top of many different
> microkernels is one main goal. I guess it is still focused on mach
> then? Probably a good at idea at this time.
>
There is (was?) an effort to get the Hurd to run on top of L4 (see
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd), which seems to be on hold atm
because the Hurd source itself relies heavily on Mach.
(...)
> No, I don't think there are anything "wrong" with dpkg, but I have a hard
> time getting used to it. Since I know think might not be the best forum
> (are there another at all?) I asked for any sources of information to be
> mailed to me, thus not cluttering up this list.
>
Well, I had only been using RPM-based Linux distibutions before I tried out
the Hurd, so I can understand how dpkg can seem confusing to you at first.
OTOH, if you keep on learning how to use it, I think you will find that
there isn't anything that makes rpm better than plain dpkg ; anything that
can be done with rpm can also be done with dpkg. There isn't so much to
learn to be able to use dpkg for debs installing either.
Trying out the Hurd got me to learn about apt and to switch to Debian for my
GNU/Linux work ; IMHO apt-get and friends are clearly superior to anything
RPM-based. OK the Hurd cannot yet benefit from the mighty apt, but I'm sure
it will work in the future...
I think you have a point with your popularity argument. The Hurd would
clearly benefit from having more users. But OTOH, there is quite a lot of
learning involved before you can contribute anything even vaguely useful to
the Hurd ; I still haven't found enough time to do this myself. I don't
think that people who are put off by a different packaging system can really
help (please don't take this as a flame against yourself ; I understand how
dpkg can be confusing at first).
Free software contributors are volunteers ; IMO nobody has the right to tell
them what they "must" decide to work on, even if it results in duplicate
efforts. But the Hurd gets very little brain time, so its few contributors'd
rather concentrate on the most "important" issues. I fail to see how having
a non-RPM packaging system can be considered an "important" issue, so I
doubt such a project would get much support.
PS : would help-hurd be more relevant for this discussion ? I wasn't sure so
I decided to reply here.
--
David
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