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GNU Hurd 0.6 Released
jrepin writes It has been roughly a year and a half since the last release of the GNU Hurd operating system, so it may be of interest to some readers that GNU Hurd 0.6 has been released along with GNU Mach 1.5 (the microkernel that Hurd runs on) and GNU MIG 1.5 (the Mach Interface Generator, which generates code to handle remote procedure calls). New features include procfs and random translators; cleanups and stylistic fixes, some of which came from static analysis; message dispatching improvements; integer hashing performance improvements; a split of the init server into a startup server and an init program based on System V init; and more.
They announced work on Hurd when I was still in university. I've worked a career, ended up disabled, retired, and spent years on a pet project since then, producing 13 point releases. Over 30 years have gone by.
Yet they've still only reached release 0.6? So one decimal point release every FIVE YEARS?
Jesus.
Stick a fork in this project.
It's done -- as in dead. Pushing up daisies. Pining for the fjords. Defunct. Deceased. Non functional.
It's not even worthy of being called a pipe dream any more. Even "Duke Nukem' Forever" beat them to the punch, and everyone gave up on that project long before it was released.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Who the hell works on the 99% of open source software that isn't popular, and why do they care? Because they do.
Why is the above post marked troll?
Maybe because people are getting tired of systemd posts on every single story, regardless of whether it is a story about the latest news from the LHC or an update on the new Star Wars movie. They are not simply off-topic posts, but are like are the racist or anti-feminist rant posts that are also made trying to get people arguing about off-topic BS, i.e. trying to troll for a reaction.
why not state you should have fill in the blank here and make him look like an idiot versus marking him as a troll?
The post seems to follow a common pattern of people claiming it can't log stuff that it can log. For the first couple months you could find detailed replies telling people how to enable things that they perpetually claimed were not possible, but after a while I think the helpful sorts realized a significant fraction of such posts had to be trolls. After all, off-topic threads on Slashdot is not the place to come to fix your system configuration.
Seems like someone advocating systemd is marking anyone they disagree with troll.
Seems like someone is marking both pro and anti systemd posts as trolls.
There are many reasons:
It doesn't play well with others. It works well enough with a use case that exactly matches the expectations of the developers, but put a toe outside that and you're in for some genuine hell. It takes a nice modular system and turns it into an all or nothing hairball of dependencies.
People keep claiming it's simple, but they never seem to notice the big pile of crap in /lib/systemd, /var/lib/systemd, etc etc.
It takes a joke like the "COME FROM" statement and actually implements it!
It won't quit metastasizing.
There is nothing it does that couldn't be implemented in a truly modular and far less invasive way.
It's a solution looking for a problem.
101 posts and not a single one with technical content. Somebody should create a slashdot post generator, with modules producing output of these kinds:
- internet meme repeater ("year of Linux on the desktop", "stallman eats his own toes", "thou shalt not compare to nazi");
- xkcd repeater (its output is prefixed by the string "obligatory" and displays a strong prevalence of this one);
- project deprecator ("this software is so stupid, I could write a better one with one arm tied behind my back, except I'm too smart to actually do it");
- Google/Apple/Microsoft PR ("it's not Google who kills kittens! It's their subcontractors!");
and, last but not least,
- Slashdot deprecator ("slashdot is no longer a nice site to read these days").
Linus (impatient with the pace of HURD) developed a quick and dirty kernel that a Unix user land could be built on top of. He took a lot of shortcuts, he didn't think too much about portability and basically just made a beeline for the end line - to get a shell and hence other stuff running over a kernel. The kernel filled out and became portable as the project gained momentum and volunteers.
Whereas HURD got stuck up its own ass for correctness and politics. And that's even before Linux existed as a thing. It's hardly a surprise that when Linux did appear that people jumped ship.
It's true there was a debate about micro kernel designs but that alone doesn't explain HURD's failure.
Does it now support HDDs larger than 2 GB? I'm not even joking here.
Last time I heard (like 10 years ago or so) it was a theorists wet dream but basically unusable.
What's the state of things with Hurd nwo? Is it usefull already?
What are big steps Hurd still needs to take to be ready for prime time?
What are the plans? When are we there?
Please note: I have no problem replacing Unix with something better, like ome coolDMI thing where everything isn't a file but an object and the system is cleanly designed from top to bottom and back. Top notch but everything modifiable. But it has to be real-world usable and useful. Until then I'm sticking with *nix derivates such as OS X on Apple hardware or some x86 Linux like Debian or Ubuntu on ThinkPads.
Could someone give some enlightenment on this issue?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's why people want systemd. If I look at sysvinit scripts, there are a ton of magic stuff going on that I don't know, and maybe nobody knows. On Ubuntu 12.04 the sysvinit script for Apache is over 7000 bytes long, and it includes bad stuff like "# wait until really stopped" with a loop of kill and sleep. The ClamAV init script is even bigger, over 9000 byes long. Is there any maintainer who really knows what it does?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Why do people dislike systemd so much?
It is largely down to terrible marketing and poor public relations. We all need to have someone to hate.