Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS • Hacker News Board

Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

#91

Post by jfb » Tue, Dec 25, 2012, 4:34 PM UTC

rogerbinns wrote: post #90

jfb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why POSIX? There's only so much lipstick any one pig can take.

Because it gets you an immense amount of existing tools that you won't have to reimplement. You can get shells, compilers, and numerous utilities (eg cp, cat, tail, tar, zip, awk). Look at the list of what BusyBox includes to get an idea of the kind of functionality any system would need to get started. http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html If you provide terminal emulation then you also get editors. If you i…

Sure, but keep in mind that my ideal would also involve discarding most what a POSIX compatibility layer would get you. Why cleanroom a nifty kernel and then turn it into something that's almost exactly like what already exists? If you want Unix, you know where to find it, as the wag said.

Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

#92

Post by rogerbinns » Tue, Dec 25, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

jfb wrote: post #91

rogerbinns wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it gets you an immense amount of existing tools that you won't have to reimplement. You can get shells, compilers, and numerous utilities (eg cp, cat, tail, tar, zip, awk). Look at the list of what BusyBox includes to get an idea of the kind of functionality any system would need to get started. http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html If you provide terminal emulation then you also get editors. If you i…

Sure, but keep in mind that my ideal would also involve discarding most what a POSIX compatibility layer would get you. Why cleanroom a nifty kernel and then turn it into something that's almost exactly like what already exists? If you want Unix, you know where to find it, as the wag said.

The kernel doesn't have to support POSIX. You can do the emulation in user space. The only tricky part of POSIX is fork, but chances are you won't need that for compilers etc, just exec.

In any event don't confuse the journey (some POSIX compatibility in order to advantage of existing toolchains while building your new OS) for the destination (clean, elegant, new API, world changing, nifty) OS.

And if you are going to have command line tools in your OS, they will need an API and you may as well pick a useful subset of POSIX.

Re: Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

#93

Post by ibotty » Wed, Dec 26, 2012, 2:08 AM UTC

jfb wrote: post #84

qznc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at some point, you can just put the whole FOSS environment (Firefox, Gnome, Gimp, LibreOffice, etc) on top of your kernel. Porting all those programs is much more work than writing a POSIX compatibility layer.

Well, if you want all that dross, then yes, I suppose. But the hosting user software niche is well filled by various Unix derivatives already, no?

well, if you want server-type apps you will have to port them too... most run on posix.