Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

Marcus, your reply is a kneejerk reaction (I base this on your
inablity to understand the meaning of `seems to be dead').  You
yourself claimed that Hurd/FOO (FOO != Mach) would require a rewrite,
and the only thing left from Hurd/Mach _might_ be libihash.  As for
whoms behalf I'm speaking for, who has "complained", what the GNU
maintainer guide says, all those things are quite irrelevant.  If
anything, a co-maintainer should know what should be done in the
medium to long term.  You just reverted to the `hack on what you want'
argument with `there is a new design, but there is a old one too'
instead of actually answering the question I asked.

The facts are that even a person like me who has been around these
parts for an awfully long time doesn't even know what the heck to
spend time on.  It isn't something as trivial as deciding if one
should fix rpctrace to be a bit saner, fixing tmpfs, maybe just
improving Mach, or deciding how some internal part of exec should be
handled.  It is about a whole different code base.  If the code bases
were API compatible, then all would be good, but they aren't and
probobly won't be even close to compatible.  So the question still
remains if one should spend on a code base that works, but might be
dumped, or a code base that doesn't work, but might never see the day
of light.