GNU Hurd

[Joerg Schilling]

To: jeroen at dekkers.cx, schilling at fokus.gmd.de
Cc: discussion at fsfeurope.org
Subject: Re: GNU Hurd

>From jeroen at 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 at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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