Hello everyone, As I am still a student I would like to suggest continuing the project of porting Guix to GNU/Hurd in this GSoC as well, with the objective of having a working GuixSD/Hurd by the end of the summer.
After discussions with Justus and Samuel in FOSDEM about the Guix-Hurd port I am starting to have a good idea on what is left to be done and the solution needed for the problems we have. So here's a preliminary timeline as well as a list of things to be done: Before May: 1) Merge wip-hurd branch. 2) Make the daemon handle chroot builds on the Hurd. Note here that on the Hurd, one does not need to be root to achieve isolation, so I should change the daemon to use this capability. 3) Instead of using the Linux syscall guile wrappers, I should modify Guix to use a more Hurdish way (i.e settrans) so later on we can handle translators and bootstrap a GNU/Hurd system. 4) Better understand how GuixSD startup works. May-August: 1) Implement the mechanisms for creating and mounting the initial filesystem and starting the system. 2) Implement the mechanisms to handle the Hurd servers in /hurd. I remember I was told that there may be an issue when the servers are not actually there (i.e all the binaries are in the /gnu/store). Would love if somebody could tell us more on that. 3) Isolate Linuxisms around Guix. 4) David Michael has made an excelent work on getting Shepherd working with Hurd so I don't think we will have any serious issues with the init daemon. 5) Others that will come up.. In the following weeks I will work closely with the Hurd guys to make sure we get a better understanding of everything and a detailed timeline. End of GSoC: Have a working GuixSD with Hurd as the kernel. Currently Justus (and others soon :-)) are testing Guix on their machines. We have some issues but we are working on them. Please feel free to add/correct anything from the above. Your comment/opinion may help to get things up and running faster :-) Finally I want to say that I will continue my work on this, regardless of GSoC or not, but I would like it if it was. :-) Thank you, Manolis
