Re: Hurd/L4 as a class project

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Personally: At this point I would have to climb a very large
   learning curve before I could contribute anything meaningful to
   this codebase,

What is meaningful according to you?

I consider _any_ contribution meaningful, even spelling fixes to a
help message.  It all makes things better.

   and I don't really have time right now to even begin that journey.

I don't belive that for a second, you had time to write this message,
so you had time to fix the documentation a bit (and the same applies
equally to me).  And documentation is quite important!

   Any idea that could hasten the day when more people could more
   easily contribute ought to be worth considering, at least briefly.

I told you and everyone who reads this list: pick something, anything,
and do that.  It doesn't have to be anything complex, the only thing
that matters is that the person who is doing it considers it important
enough to actually do it.

   I have indeed read the lists for years, and also a lot of the docs,
   and I must confess a lot of it makes my head hurt.  Designing
   multi-server operating systems IS like having bees live inside your
   head, apparently.

Nobody is designing a operating system here for what it is worth, only
a cute kernel and some servers. :-)
   
   People who are already deeply enmeshed in the process of making the
   Hurd could consider this mostly noise, and justifiably so -- and
   for that reason I would prefer not to continue this branch of the
   thread.

I would infact want to continue this thread so that it can die the
painful death it deserves.  You didn't answer the question that I
considered the most important:

,----
|    The Hurd is simply not the most accessible of projects.
| 
| The Hurd is accessible just like any other Free Software project
| IMHO.  You find something that you dislike, fix it, send a patch.
| Could you explain why you consider this different for the Hurd?
`----

And during my years I have never, even once, seen the answer to that
particular question.  Only people saying that this is so.