Re: A GNU/Hurd Roadmap dream

[Sergiu Ivanov]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 11:55 PM, Arne Babenhauserheide<arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3. June 2009 17:41:22 Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
>> Could you please dream how to solve the major drawbacks in Hurd and
>> to make it mainstream? :-)
>
> For that you'd need to ask my dreams ;)
>
> Sadly the dreams don't write code themselves...

:-)

> Maybe it would help them to know the other drawbacks ;)
> (except from sound, X11 and hardware)
>
> Which are the other drawbacks?
>
> I don't currently care that much about raw speed. My Linux goes to disk speed
> when it begins heavy swapping because I copy large amount of data - or
> download a torrent... or did until I beat vm.swappiness to 20. The Hurd can
> host a wiki, so why shouldn't it be usable as my desktop system?

I guess one of the most serious problems is about hardware
support... Once Hurd is able to run not only on a very limited range
of metal specifications, there will be more people willing to (at
least) try it out.

> I mostly need an email-client, a console, a webbrowser and python for most
> stuff :)
> For many things dwm suffices as Window manager ;)

Rather ascetic :-) I guess Hurd can do all this right now :-)

> (though I grew accustomed to KDE - but the Hurd would be an argument to
> abstain from KDE when working - until it supports KDE).

I remember Duck (I'm awfully sorry for not remembering his real name
:-( ) mentioning something about compiling kde4libs :-)

>> Just out of interest: what advantages of Gentoo Portage on GNU/Hurd
>> before Debian GNU/Hurd could you point out?
> [...]
> Also it has incremental updates: Gentoo doesn't have distribution releases.
> Instead each single program can be updated for itself - and when a library
> gets updated you can easily (and automatically) rebuild all programs which
> depend on it.

Ah, great! :-) I love rolling releasing OSs :-) I suppose, this could
be a bit of advantage for Gentoo GNU/Hurd, but, unfourtunately, I'm
not really into these matters, so I can't tell...

> -> more emotionally: http://draketo.de/english/songs/light/gentoo-for-me
> :)

A very nice song :-) I liked the drums, too ;-)

> Some additions about the complexity of ebuilds:
>
> The mean size of an ebuild in the tree is about 1.5kiB (±1.8) or 38 lines of
> code (±49) (excluding comments and empty lines) - I just got these numbers
> myself with some python scripting :)
>
> This means 84% of the ebuilds are below 3.3kiB in size and 87 lines in length
> (using the not perfectly fitting normal standard deviation - any statistics
> expert would surely kill me for that :) ).
>
> All ebuilds are (more or less) simple bash scripts.
>
> All in all the tree contains close to 30,000 ebuilds which equals about 14,000
> programs - in less than 180 MiB :)

This is true, but I wonder how much the somewhat reduced speed of the
Hurd may influence the build times of portage packages... Given that
the Hurd is often used in virtualized environments, this should be a
matter of concern, since .debs will install faster.

> PPS: Yes. I like Gentoo. Much :)
> It only has one drawback: You get used to it, and that spoils you for almost
> every other distro - My Kubuntu died beyond repair after half an hour of
> playing (first try) and I ran back to Gentoo :-)

I'd like to migrate to Gentoo soon :-) I've tried it some time in the
past, but it didn't fit my needs then. Nevertheless, (having listened
to your song ;-) ) I guess I'll be going into the World of Gentoo
anyway :-)

Regards,
scolobb