Hello, I was thinking last night about the Hurd, and I had some ideas that I thought I'd share. I will freely admit that I'm not a Hurd developer or a software developer. The longest piece of code I've written was a projecteuler.net solution...I've also been a huge fan of the Hurd project and have contributed very little to it. Though I do have a limited youtube channel talking about the Hurd: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtZxQB-R7coRVep-YZCNGw
With that out of the way... I think it would be an awesome idea to make a GNU/Hurd related business. An idea for this can be found at my website www.gnu-hurd.com. The basic idea is to have the Hurd host small websites for $3-$10 a month. I personally would be willing to pay $3-$5 for such a service. If anyone has any thoughts about how to do this, or is willing to host a static website for me, that would be awesome! The following is a list of things that could be done and probably would be a good idea to do. I hope I'm not stepping on anybody's toes... Samuel can't do everything. He's done sooo much to keep the Hurd alive, I'm terrified that he's going to quit working on the Hurd any day and the Hurd's will fade into oblivion. We need more people (myself included), to help him out. He nearly pleaded with people to get some help with a recent glibc update, and he barely got any help. We need doc writers. The Hurd's manual has aged a little bit. Samuel asked some people to help out with how to update the Hurd manual only a few months ago. I don't believe that many people have helped in this project. We need bug squashers. I've spent some time reading through the Savannah GNU/Hurd bug list. I've actually been able to help close 2 or 3 bugs (I think). Closing bugs is not hard. One reads the bug report, tries to reproduce it. If it cannot be reproduced, and the original complainer does not respond, then we can close the bug report. This is also a great way to get started with a free software project. It's tedious, but it needs to be done. We need to show people how to use mailing lists. I'm actually wanting to make a youtube video explaining this...Mailings lists are still super hard. They are not intuitive... I've started using Gnus, because John Wigley (current Emacs maintainer) recommended it. But it is really easy to subscribe to a mailing list and have your inbox get flooded. I personally can no longer use my hotmail account, because I subscribed to emacs-devel, bug hurd, bug guix, and guix devel. My inbox was completely flooded with emails, I was unable to unsubscribe to guix devel, and It's really hard to filter email from a mailing list out of your inbox. I'm currently able to use multiple mailing lists because I subscribe to them via the email "+" trick. I think I'm subscribed to bug-hurd with jbranso+bug-h...@gnu.org. And I have a rule that filters email sent to that email address to a separate bug hurd folder. But it's still not a perfect solution, because there are still ways that bug-hurd emails end up in my inbox. Someone accidentally responds just to me and does not CC the list. I've actually heard that one should probably use Sieve scripts to use mailing lists, but again this is a tough hill to climb. To start contributing to mozilla, you can just use a web interface. I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm complaining. I'm really not trying to sound that way. We need people to port more software to the Hurd. The Hurd is probably the coolest POSIX compatible modular OS. Genode is starting to be a decent contender, and Redox OS and X15 may be in a few years. The Hurd would probably be more useable if we had more software porters. This is probably something I could potentially do. We need to have GNU/Hurd hangouts, just like the Emacs hangouts. I had one such hangout, but only one person showed up. I'm not sure what free software solution we should have to do Hurd hangouts. Maybe Google Chat is still the best solution... We need an easy way to have people assign code to GNU. If you live in the U.S. you can actually use an electronic signature! We could have software that would automate the copyright assigning process. Thanks, Joshua P.S. Samuel feel free to let me know if this email sounded too presumptuous.
