Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

"Alfred M\. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> writes:

> Your students have it easier, they know what to work on: the paper on
> a specific topic. That is a specific goal, `the Hurd' has no such
> goal, is it Hurd/Mach, Hurd/L4 or what?  You say that you don't know,
> I don't know.  What do you tell a student who has been writting his
> final paper a while now, and then after having worked on it for a
> while, you tell him that this isn't what he was supposed to write
> about and has now to start from scratch since initally you told him to
> do his own thing?

I'm not going to start telling people to stop work on some other
project.  Really, work on what *you* think is valuable.  I cannot tell
you what you will think is valuable.

I have already said that *I* think that the Hurd was a good attempt,
but that my own primary interests in OS design now lie elsewhere.
Each of us has our own *different* views, and I have nothing against
offering what support I can to those who wish to work on it.  But I'm
not going to guess about something I simply don't know.

This is a lot more like a researcher asking "which experiment should I
do" and I'm saying, "we just don't know until we start doing them."