To: jeroen@dekkers.cx, schilling@fokus.gmd.de Cc: discussion@fsfeurope.org Subject: Re: GNU Hurd
From jeroen@dekkers.cx Sun Mar 17 13:54:46 2002
I did say that nobody was interested in cdrecord for HURD
Which is totally untrue. I know at least one person who is interested: Marcus Brinkmann. I'm sure there are more people interested in cdrecord for the Hurd. They only didn't told you or me about it.
Well, this was yesterday and this is _after_ I wrote this statement.
Let us see if I will get feedback from him so it will be possible to do the port.....
I do real work on the Hurd. I have exactly NONE interest in cdrecord, I don't even have a burner!
If you don't have a burner then you are different from most people.
cdrecord has been #1 of interest for a long time and still is at rank #3 (but could be at #2 if there were not so many bugs in Linux).
So based on freshmeat somebody would first install linux, then MPLayer and then cdrecord? And after that they are going to install glibc, gcc, etc? Or is it just because they can't find the homepage of cdrecord and they use cdrecord to find it and the other homepages are easier to find?
Go you again are kidding. Nobody is interested to install a new version if glibc because it has a new feature because there are no killer features added to glibc on a regular base.
However people replace the cdrecord version that comes with their e.g. linux dist if it adds features they are interested in.
Now let's base our facts on one of the biggest distribution of software, Debian, instead of mouse clicks of some users. In Debian cdrecord is priority extra, which is the lowest priority. Nobody seems to complain about that although Debian has a lot of users.
Ask Debian why. Also ask them about their strange method of tracking bugs. Until the end of last year, they listed 'bugs' for cdrecord as still present that have been really Linux kernel bugs and have been fixed more then 2 years ago.
If we look at the popularity contents at http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/index.html and specifically http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/results/results.otherosfs, we see that only 262 of 1829 individual have cdrecord installed and use it frequently. That's only 14% of the users, not that important.
This does not look correct to me. While not so many installed machines _use_ cdrecord, > 50% if the Linux users (persons) use cdrecord on a regular base.
It's nice that many people who are interested in cdrecord looks up the homepage using freshmeat, but it doesn't say anything about how many people use it. Most of the computers don't even have the hardware to make cdrecord an useful program!
What do you call a non-trivial program? I can give some packages ported anyhow: XFree86, ssh, emacs, vim, ruby, python, TeX, ...=20
ssh would be a at the border to a non trivial program, while emacs is a trivial program from portability perspective.
You still didn't answer my question. Why should I use cdrecord on if I want to do real work? I can do real work without cdrecord. I've done real work for years without cdrecord. 86% of the individuals doing Debian's popularity contents can do real work without cdrecord.
Most people use CDs for some sort of data exchange and at least back up selected stuff for long term storage, that's why I assume that most people doing real work use cdrecord.
WTF do you think I'm doing? I'm working on it. I make it of interest for potential users. But you are doing to the opposite and try to make the Hurd look bad with spreading your lies. Stop doing that please.
Sorry but you are spreading lies. You are telling people that HURD is better than other OS. If this would be true, many people would use it. This is why I give you the advise to _make_ HURD superior and then people will just use it.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 schilling@fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix
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Joerg Schilling schilling@fokus.gmd.de writes:
Sorry but you are spreading lies. You are telling people that HURD is better than other OS. If this would be true, many people would use it.
GNU/Hurd has the potential to become a really superior OS, compared to Unix. Unix has so many limitations, which are caused by it's design. The Hurd wants to fix that.
This is why I give you the advise to _make_ HURD superior and then people will just use it.
Guess what Jeroen is doing.
moritz
On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 09:21:38AM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
Let us see if I will get feedback from him so it will be possible to do the port.....
I doesn't make sense for me to use smake because I am stuck with the Debian packaging of cdrecord, which uses GNU make. If you would use autoconf, or at least config.guess in your package, then I could have at least attempted to port any of the tools in the package. But because you roll your own build system, which of course got confused about our uname output (we use something like i386-i386AT for the machine, and the dash seems to mess up your patterns), I could only spent some time trying to find out what KARCH, XARCH, whatever-ARCH are supposed to mean when I ran out of time.
On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 09:21:38AM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
Which is totally untrue. I know at least one person who is interested: Marcus Brinkmann. I'm sure there are more people interested in cdrecord for the Hurd. They only didn't told you or me about it.
Well, this was yesterday and this is _after_ I wrote this statement.
Yeah
Let us see if I will get feedback from him so it will be possible to do the port.....
I don't think so as we first have to design the generic SCSI interfaces AFAIK.
I do real work on the Hurd. I have exactly NONE interest in cdrecord, I don't even have a burner!
If you don't have a burner then you are different from most people.
cdrecord has been #1 of interest for a long time and still is at rank #3 (but could be at #2 if there were not so many bugs in Linux).
So based on freshmeat somebody would first install linux, then MPLayer and then cdrecord? And after that they are going to install glibc, gcc, etc? Or is it just because they can't find the homepage of cdrecord and they use cdrecord to find it and the other homepages are easier to find?
Go you again are kidding. Nobody is interested to install a new version if glibc because it has a new feature because there are no killer features added to glibc on a regular base.
Glibc doesn't need a lot of updates because it is good and stable software. Also the killer features are features were programmers are interested in, not were users are interested in. Still almost all of the GNU/Linux users use glibc. I would rather have C library on my system than a cd burning program.
However people replace the cdrecord version that comes with their e.g. linux dist if it adds features they are interested in.
I do that with every piece of software. That's the exact reason I never have to use freshmeat, Debian unstable is fresh enough.
Now let's base our facts on one of the biggest distribution of software, Debian, instead of mouse clicks of some users. In Debian cdrecord is priority extra, which is the lowest priority. Nobody seems to complain about that although Debian has a lot of users.
Ask Debian why. Also ask them about their strange method of tracking bugs.
The Debian bug tracking system is fine. I don't see much distributions doing it better. Note that it's actually an internal thing to Debian, we only have an open organisation.
Until the end of last year, they listed 'bugs' for cdrecord as still present that have been really Linux kernel bugs and have been fixed more then 2 years ago.
You should not ask Debian that, you should ask the Debian maintainer of cdrecord. Debian is a very large project with a lot of developers. Just don't say that Debian does something if only one developer of Debian does it. Also we weren't talking about Debian, we were talking about the popularity of cdrecord. Debian was only an example because it's a big distribution and I use it.
If we look at the popularity contents at http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/index.html and specifically http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/results/results.otherosfs, we see that only 262 of 1829 individual have cdrecord installed and use it frequently. That's only 14% of the users, not that important.
This does not look correct to me. While not so many installed machines _use_ cdrecord, > 50% if the Linux users (persons) use cdrecord on a regular base.
Not even 50% of the Linux users have a burner. At least in the world I live in. Nor do all the people who have a burner burn cds every day.
This are _real_ numbers, you only can't face the *facts*. I'm waiting for your research which tells that more than 50% of the users use cdrecord. Note that the Debian popularity contents makes a different between using and having installed. If you only count on
BTW, 100% of the GNU/Linux users use glibc on a regular base. So do 99% use gzip. I think if we look at the package ported to GNU/Hurd and the popularity-contents Debian GNU/Hurd isn't doing that bad.
What do you call a non-trivial program? I can give some packages ported anyhow: XFree86, ssh, emacs, vim, ruby, python, TeX, ...=20
ssh would be a at the border to a non trivial program, while emacs is a trivial program from portability perspective.
Emacs isn't a trvial program. It's only nice written so it's portable, that doesn't make it trivial. Did you ever looked at the source? It's a mail client, browser, debugger, editor, etc.
You still didn't answer my question. Why should I use cdrecord on if I want to do real work? I can do real work without cdrecord. I've done real work for years without cdrecord. 86% of the individuals doing Debian's popularity contents can do real work without cdrecord.
Most people use CDs for some sort of data exchange and at least back up selected stuff for long term storage, that's why I assume that most people doing real work use cdrecord.
There are a lot of other ways of making backups. My favourite one is to use another hard disk.
WTF do you think I'm doing? I'm working on it. I make it of interest for potential users. But you are doing to the opposite and try to make the Hurd look bad with spreading your lies. Stop doing that please.
Sorry but you are spreading lies. You are telling people that HURD is better than other OS.
You are spreading lies. I've never said that. If I did, please give me the url of the archive where I said that. I'm just going to ignore your lies from now on.
If this would be true, many people would use it.
1) The thing you said isn't true. 2) Your conclusion is wrong, GNU/Linux is better than windows still more people use windows.
This is why I give you the advise to _make_ HURD superior and then people will just use it.
I don't need your advice. I already found that out about a year ago. And I give you the advice to stop telling lies and first look if your guess is right before saying things. Or just mark it as it, like "I think the Hurd is dead because I haven't heard from it for a long time." instead of just "the Hurd is dead".
Jeroen Dekkers