Bug#669647: ITP: hurd-cvsfs -- CVS virtual filesystem for the GNU Hurd

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Roger Leigh, le Mon 23 Apr 2012 09:44:32 +0100, a écrit :
> While it's great that Hurd can support all of these esoteric
> translators, in terms of making Hurd a viable *Debian* port,
> we really only need a few specific ones:
> 
> - tmpfs
> - procfs
> - ext?fs

They are already there.

> - sysfs

Err, I don't think it's a good idea to let people think it is ok to use
extremely-linuxish things there.

> Yet we are carrying
> around large amounts of code and extra initscripts to generate
> mtab for the only system which does not support /proc/mounts
> (Hurd).  A procfs translator (even an incomplete one) would
> allow all this (barely tested) cruft to be dropped.

We have an incomplete procfs already.  It doesn't have /proc/mounts,
because it's not a trivial thing to implement: since mounts are
distributed, there is no central place where filesystems are to be
recorded.  There are plans to somehowe build one.  In the meanwhile
things are working already.  I don't think spending time on a feature
just to remove some existing code is the best way to spend our time,
either.

> It would be really great if the efforts of the Hurd developers
> could be directed to getting the translators which are of
> direct benefit to the distribution as a whole functional, rather
> than features such as this--who uses CVS nowadays anyway, let
> along through a translator?  It's neat, but not really useful
> (from the POV of the distribution as a whole).

There are two answers:

- Yet, this is neat.  And we need such neat features to show that
GNU/Hurd can have neat features, and is thus worth caring about.

- See the development dates: all this code was developped before 2007.
It took me very little time to make them Debian packages, to make that
work actually be easily usable; it would be too bad that such nice work
is not exposed.  It just happens that sometimes it's what takes the
least time (trivial packaging) that has the most visible effects (ITPs).
On the other hand, I've spent the whole week-end fixing some bits in
glibc/parted/grub, which we *DO* need for a release.

Samuel