Re: Maintenance of the Hurd parts in glibc

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 02:36:32PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> There may be a misunderstanding.   Two different issues were raised:
> getting Hurd-related changes into Glibc, and getting changes into the Hurd.
> Here I'm talking about appointing another Hurd maintainer to get changes
> installed in the Hurd itself.

Aha, I see.

Well, getting changes into glibc has proven to be difficult enough, but
it seems we now found a way to do so.  Hopefully.

Getting non-invasive (read: bug-fixing and the like) changes into the
Hurd's code base is not an issue, as I can do (and actually do) all that.
For getting invasive (read: interface changes and the like) changes into
the Hurd we'd need (a) people to come up with such changes (!) and (b)
have them attract Thomas Bushnell's or Roland McGrath's or Marcus
Brinkmann's attention (which often enough is not trivial).

It is true that there are issues that nobody layed down the law for: most
notably the proposed interface changes (some years ago already) that have
been proposed to support file systems bigger than 2 GiB and for with
patches exist that also have been in use in the Debian hurd packages for
years now, but never found their way into the official Hurd trunk.


But I deem it's very difficult to find someone to judge on such issues
and have that person be a judge with Thomas Bushnell's or Roland
McGrath's or Marcus Brinkmann's qualities.

I can't be that person, and neither can -- in my opinion -- be the other
people who took part in this discussion so far, as everyone of us lacks
the experience to judge on such things.  Alternatively one could open up
the Hurd repository for experimentation.  Then everything would be
possible, of course.  But I can't imagine that's what the Hurd's core
maintainers (the three ones I already quoted) want.


Regards,
 Thomas

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature