HHG and newbie Hurd Hackers

[R. Steven Rainwater]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 16:21, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> For what it's worth, Ben Asselstine has been working on
> updating it.  A pre-release of the updated version if being
> offered from <http://www.asselstine.com/hhg.pdf>.

> ...But: everone of you can contribute! Work through the
> update HHG, for example, and tell us about things you
> don't understand or want to have changed.

I'm new to Hurd development and I've spent the last few days struggling
to find hardware the Debian GNU/Hurd distro will install on. Now that
I've done that, I'm looking at how to compile the Hurd from source and
perhaps start doing some minor development work. 

I've looked at the HHG and it's very helpful for technical information
about the code itself. But what would be more helpful for me right now
is a "How to become a Hurd Hacker" tutorial that provides a step-by-step
explanation of setting up a Hurd development box, finding the right Hurd
source, creating a patch in the approved way, and submitting it to the
right person. For example, here are a few of the questions I've been
thinking about:

Should I create patches against the savannah CVS source or some other
source archive used by the Debian folks? If the savannah source, which
branch? Is the MAIN branch something I can compile and expect to run on
my box or are there some release (1.2, 1.3) branches somewhere for that?
Are there specific versions of gcc that should be used? What's the chain
of command for developers as far as submitting patches? Are there
specific people maintaining specific parts of the kernel to whom patches
should be submitted or do they all go the same place?

I've already found answers to some of these on #hurd but I'm afraid
they'll get tired of me asking too many dumb questions eventually. :)

Here's an example that explains this sort of stuff for new Linux
hackers:

http://www.linuxchix.org/content/courses/kernel_hacking/lesson0

It goes through preparing the development environment, downloading and
configuring the source, creating and submitting patches (including
political considerations), and then goes into the technical stuff about
the kernel code.

-Steve