Some Hurd related thoughts from someone who has no right to talk

[Joshua Branson]

Hello,

I was thinking last night about the Hurd, and I had some ideas that I
thought I'd share.  I will freely admit that I'm not a Hurd developer or
a software developer.  The longest piece of code I've written was a
projecteuler.net solution...I've also been a huge fan of the Hurd
project and have contributed very little to it.  Though I do have a
limited youtube channel talking about the Hurd:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtZxQB-R7coRVep-YZCNGw

With that out of the way...

I think it would be an awesome idea to make a GNU/Hurd related business.
An idea for this can be found at my website www.gnu-hurd.com.  The basic
idea is to have the Hurd host small websites for $3-$10 a month.  I
personally would be willing to pay $3-$5 for such a service.  If anyone
has any thoughts about how to do this, or is willing to host a static
website for me, that would be awesome!

The following is a list of things that could be done and probably would
be a good idea to do.  I hope I'm not stepping on anybody's toes...

Samuel can't do everything.  He's done sooo much to keep the Hurd
alive, I'm terrified that he's going to quit working on the Hurd
any day and the Hurd's will fade into oblivion.  We need more
people (myself included), to help him out.  He nearly pleaded
with people to get some help with a recent glibc update, and he
barely got any help.

We need doc writers.  The Hurd's manual has aged a little bit.
Samuel asked some people to help out with how to update the Hurd
manual only a few months ago.  I don't believe that many people
have helped in this project.

We need bug squashers.  I've spent some time reading through the
Savannah GNU/Hurd bug list.  I've actually been able to help
close 2 or 3 bugs (I think).  Closing bugs is not hard.  One
reads the bug report, tries to reproduce it.  If it cannot be
reproduced, and the original complainer does not respond, then we
can close the bug report.  This is also a great way to get
started with a free software project.  It's tedious, but it needs
to be done.

We need to show people how to use mailing lists.  I'm actually wanting
to make a youtube video explaining this...Mailings lists are still super
hard.  They are not intuitive...  I've started using Gnus, because John
Wigley (current Emacs maintainer) recommended it.  But it is really easy
to subscribe to a mailing list and have your inbox get flooded.  I
personally can no longer use my hotmail account, because I subscribed to
emacs-devel, bug hurd, bug guix, and guix devel.  My inbox was
completely flooded with emails, I was unable to unsubscribe to guix
devel, and It's really hard to filter email from a mailing list out of
your inbox.

I'm currently able to use multiple mailing lists because I subscribe to
them via the email "+" trick.  I think I'm subscribed to bug-hurd with
jbranso+bug-hurd@gnu.org.  And I have a rule that filters email sent to
that email address to a separate bug hurd folder.  But it's still not a
perfect solution, because there are still ways that bug-hurd emails end
up in my inbox.  Someone accidentally responds just to me and does not
CC the list.

I've actually heard that one should probably use Sieve scripts to use
mailing lists, but again this is a tough hill to climb.  To start
contributing to mozilla, you can just use a web interface.  I'm sorry if
this sounds like I'm complaining.  I'm really not trying to sound that way.  

We need people to port more software to the Hurd.  The Hurd is
probably the coolest POSIX compatible modular OS.  Genode is
starting to be a decent contender, and Redox OS and X15 may be in
a few years.  The Hurd would probably be more useable if we had
more software porters.  This is probably something I could
potentially do.

We need to have GNU/Hurd hangouts, just like the Emacs hangouts.
I had one such hangout, but only one person showed up.  I'm not
sure what free software solution we should have to do Hurd
hangouts.  Maybe Google Chat is still the best solution...

We need an easy way to have people assign code to GNU.  If you live in
the U.S. you can actually use an electronic signature!  We could have
software that would automate the copyright assigning process.

Thanks,

Joshua

P.S. Samuel feel free to let me know if this email sounded too presumptuous.