At Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:51:55 +0200, William DUCK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello Mr Brinkmann, > > Sorry for the perturbation... > > But I ask myself why the HURD project takes so much time to have a 1.0 > release ...
That's a very good question, and worth thinking about. It provides important lessons for any future or on-going effort. One can't nail it down to a single reason. You have to consider the history of the free software movement and the history of operating system research together. However, of these two, I think that the history of operating system research is more important. In essence, it is an open research problem if a microkernel multi-server operating system can succeed to provide a competitive general-purpose operating system that scales up and down and is deployed in a wide range of fields of endeavour. Even if we limit the scope, the task is very challenging. There has been important progress in the last decade, but there are still some (many?) question marks. > Why did you choose coyotos that has only a commercial interest ? Neal and I have looked at much of the relevant research in the last years. EROS/Coyotos is interesting because it tells us a lot about how to structure secure capability-based operating design. This has lead to a much better understanding of the Hurd design itself, and how to improve on it. That Coyotos is also (not exclusively, as you portrait it) a commercial project is true of almost every other interesting project out there, and a clear benefit. The question if Coyotos should be used to build an actual system implementation is a question of utility, and depends only on technical and legal matters, and little else. > Is there nowadays a real alternative to GNU/Linux & Windows ? It depends on what you mean by "real". For specific applications, GNU/Linux or Windows isn't even an option. But the Hurd is certainly targeted to compete with the systems you named, and in this context the question is an important one, but one that has no known answer. That's what we are trying to find out! > You don't realize that you represented hope for many users in the > world ... I do realize it, and it is kinda pressuring. But I don't have a magic hat. I have put a lot of effort into trying to understand the issues involved, and I feel I am only about halfway to a solution. That's not meant to be discouraging, quite the opposite: Naivity has made room for a path to understanding, which means that at least today I understand much better what we don't know, but need to know to make progress on these issues. > The mailing-list is nearly empty, the l4-hurd cvs is frozen since many > months, coyotos doesn't build ... > > I have decided to ask the help to many experts ( bart massey, rene rebe, > logic experts, HurdFR team... ) to build a fork. You are welcomed to it, in fact, I can only strongly encourage you to make your own experiences. However, I have to ask you one thing: Please do it in a non-disruptive manner. There are very simple rules of respect in human-to-human interaction that you seem to have violated in the last days. This is completely unnecessary, and actually works against you. Let me finish this mail on an up-beat: You have mentioned and referenced interesting research projects. For example, you have raised the issue of what effect the choice of programming language has on system design, among other things. Well, sometimes we don't do something simply because we are ignorant about it, so we reject it because we don't have any idea what to do with it, and don't have the time to learn at this point. So, one thing you could do is to become a domain expert on these issues, and report back to us with your finding. Be aware those that this does mean more than just sending links and web page quotes, or asking others to do the work for you. It means that you do the researching and studying, and that you get to give the answers to the questions, combining knowledge from domain experts in related fields to specific knowledge you add about the Hurd. This is harder than sending around emails, but it is also much more rewarding, and it harms nobody! For example, if you head over to http://www.marcus-brinkmann.org/cap-papers/ you will find out that there is not a single paper in there that ties operating system research to language research. That's a glaring gap in this subjective and personal collection. If someone where to collect the most important papers about this topic, and would review them and put them into the context of the Hurd project, that would be an important contribution in my view. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
