Heard from the HURD?

[Robert Stone]

On Sat, Jul 10, 1999 at 08:48:25PM -0700, Jim Franklin wrote:
> Hi folks,
>   I've been trying the last couple of days to subscribe to the
> debian-hurd mailing list.  Four attempts, four failures.  I subscribed
> to the debian-python mailing list without problem so it isn't my
> machine.  I've contacted the listmaster at debian but haven't received a
> reply yet.  Is there a secret password or secret handshake or something
> I'm missing?

	I had the same kind of problems subscribing to the hurd mailing
lists at the FSF about a year ago.  Maybe they've been linked or
something. :)

>   Has anyone had a chance to try out debian GNU/HURD yet?  It's supposed
> to be fairly stable I hear and the architecture (eg transparent ftp,
> Mach4 microkernel) sounds intriguing.  Anybody hurd anything?
> 
	I haven't done an install of Hurd since Debian started working on
it, but debian is not making huge changes to it's code, just porting our
stuff.  In it's current state it's not ready for public consumption, not
even close.  Lots of random unexplained happenings are frequent on some
hardware.  My system never stayed up long enough to compile libc.  I could
leave it sitting idle for days, but under load it tended to crash.  My
goal was to recompile libc, but this caused crashes frequently.
Eventually I set up booting to jump into continuing my libc compile.  On
three seperate installs (one with ext2fs, one with bsd slices, third on
new hardware with ext2fs) the system would corrupt itself more and more
until the it finally failed to reach multiuser mode, never getting enough
work accomplished to finish the libc compile.  This is probably kind of a
horror story, but seriously YMMV.
	The design of Hurd is stable and proven and I am very fond of it,
but our codebase it still in progress.  I'm not trying to dissuade you
from using it, but I wouldn't want you to go through the trouble if
your not expecting to do a little hacking.
						-Robert