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Re: Hurd Mission Statement


From: olafBuddenhagen
Subject: Re: Hurd Mission Statement
Date: Sat, 30 May 2009 08:16:53 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

Hi,

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 01:08:51AM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27. May 2009 16:45:52 Sergiu Ivanov wrote:

> I hope the niches discussion was useful nontheless. 

Definitely! It helped me a lot in getting a clearer picture of these
things.

> The only part I am not perfectly sure about is if it's clear enough
> *for whom* it is. 
> 
> Does "everyday use" imply use as desktop OS? Or does it just say "this
> is not only for some specific projects"? 

Not sure what you mean by "desktop OS"...

The point is that it doesn't need to be the most stable or most secure
or most performant system etc.; but it must be Good Enough (TM) on all
there points, so that people would actually be willing to use it for
their work (or whatever they do with their computers), rather than just
toying around with it now and then, while doing their actual work with
some "real" OS...

Perhaps we should say "production use" instead? Though I fear that some
people would construe that as focusing on professional users, which is
not the point at all...

> What's the difference between "general-purpose" and "everyday use"? 

AFAIK "general-purpose operating system" is a well-established term in
operating system development: it means that it's flexible enough to
serve all kinds of use cases (desktop, server, embedded, compute cluster
etc.), rather than just specific ones -- unlike embedded systems for
example, which are usually quite limited.

Personally I'm chiefly interested in the desktop case -- but that's the
most demanding one anyways: desktop applications are so diverse, that a
system flexible enough to serve them all, can easily serve other
purposes as well...

And that's really the important point: While there are several
multiserver systems available for the embedded market, AFAIK there is
not a single general-purpose system using such an architecture ready for
production use. In fact, the Hurd comes closer to this goal than any
other system I know...

-antrik-




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