Shortest path to significant improvement in hardware support

[Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro]

Hello, Hurd hackers!

My main goal working on Hurd is to get more people to use the GNU
system, so we can achieve critical mass to make the system develop at
an acceptably pace.  In order to solve this problem it's necessary to
fix the most prominent issue preventing people from migrating to it,
that is, its lack of hardware support.

Thus, in order to form an wider user-base as soon as possible, we need
to improve Hurd's hardware support using the shortest (thus fastest)
path available.  For that goal's sake alone, in principle, it doesn't
matter the technicalities of a particular implementation, as
long as it works for the majority of use cases, it's quick to implement
and easy to maintain.

From that perspective I'm looking for the most straightforward way to
get hardware working on Hurd --- primarily USB as it seems that it
along with sound (Robert Millan's work) is what people need most.

After some thought I came to the conclusion that the way to achieve
these requirements is to patch core libraries like libusb to use
librump directly, analogously to what Robert Millan did originally for
mplayer and sound support.

This way we don't have to make the settlement of wonders about "the
(elegant and powerful) true Hurdish way" become a dependency of the
actual hardware support the Hurd community needs so badly.

What are your thoughts on that?


Ps: Sorry for the long delay, but as you can see by my signature,
since my introductory message I've got some titles that require a
significant amount of work.  Nevertheless, I'll make sure Hurd gets at
least 50% of my available time and brainwidth.  That is a full-time
half-time developer. ;-)

-- 
 ,= ,-_-. =.  Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix) [0x28D618AF]
((_/)o o(\_)) http://oitofelix.freeshell.org/
 `-'(. .)`-'  irc://chat.freenode.org/oitofelix
     \_/      xmpp:oitofelix@riseup.net

GNU ccd2cue maintainer
GNU Savannah hacker
GNU web translation team coordinator (Brazilian Portuguese)
GNU audio and video maintainer
DMOZ free software editor (Portuguese)
UFU FAMAT PET member

[GNU DISCLAIMER] I'm a GNU hacker, but my views don't necessarily
match those of the GNU project.  Hereby I express my own opinion,
style and perception, in good faith, aiming the betterment of GNU.

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