Project History

The GNU/Hurd development effort is a special interest group of the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project announced initially in 1983 by Richard M Stallman (RMS). Technically the Hurd is a set of daemons running on top of the Mach microkernel but it is commonly now used to refer to the Debian GNU/Hurd port. The Hurd's design predates Linux but the development pace of Linux has far surpassed the Hurd's. It is the last major piece necessary to complete a fully GNU approved vision of an entirely free software operating system.

Debian GNU/Linux is used today by most GNU advocates. Many folks have test Hurd machines but even the most dedicated developers do not generally rely on it for day to day operations.

After years of tinkering around with the Hurd and installing a couple of test systems with the early development versions I decided to help with the Hurd project effort. As I became more involved in the project I quickly realized the lack of organization and the frustration among the user community. HurdWiki:Main/HurdGnuFansOrg was primarily built in response to the lack of dedicated volunteers and lack of access to manage the official Hurd (http://hurd.gnu.org) website. There were other valuable documents scattered across the world, but few casual users were able to find them.

The Hurd community is already using a web site (http://hurd.gnu.org) as well as IRC (see HurdWiki:Main/HurdIRC for description) and mail lists (see HurdWiki:Main/MailLists for description). Some tools already in use include IRC statistics (weekly and global summaries updated daily), an IRC bot named hbot and use of TWiki for collaborative web page development for release notes and our installation instructions. Coders still seem to use email and diff (sometimes CVS) for their own open source work, sometimes displaying these via the web.

Our installation was performed by JoachimNilsson in May 2002. It began as a single TWiki web named Hurd. We were unable to design a priori a web structure. By the end of the year after gaining experience and with slow growth we transitioned to a multiple web structure. During this process we became dissatisfied with the existing Skins. JoachimNilsson developed the GnuSkin which we use today and have contributed back to the TWiki development.

Operating Practices

Our management coordination is through topics in each web named WebDiscuss. We also have a site wide topic called TWikiDiscuss though we may rename it to GnufansDiscuss in the future to help our site maintain it's own identity within the community rather than clinging to the TWiki identity of that our site also rightfully has since we run the TWiki software to power the site. Use of these topics has worked well. Since one person was the systems administrator and another is another site founder, these topics have been critical for not only coordinating with ourselves (with occassional email threads as well) but also allowing other people to participate in the building of our public TWiki site.

Goals

We are encouraging more widespread use of the site within the Hurd community. We are continuing to install and learn more advanced TWiki features and implement them.

Learning how to better integrate the existing collaborative resources are interesting areas for future expansion and potential TWiki development. Mail list integration is an area that might be extremely useful for our community.

-- GrantBow - 25 Jan 2003