# <a name="The_GNU_Operating_System"> </a> The GNU Operating System

It is our wish/goal to establish a new direction with regards to a GNU system distribution. To that end we have established this wiki page to begin setting some direction. This was spawned from several discussions over the last few days in the Hurd mailing lists and IRC.

This is not intended to detract from Debian GNU/Hurd and we should help them where we can.

I really want this to be more of a community driven effort in the spirit of say Ubuntu. We all have different motivations and skill levels but we need a common goal to get this system going.

These are just some quick notes I am making late at night. Lets clean this up.

## <a name="What_is_driving_this_"> What is driving this? </a>

1. There is a possibility that Debian drops support for GNU/Hurd.
2. Other GNU/Linux based distros do not support the Hurd infrastructure well.
3. Freedom.

## <a name="Where_do_we_start_"> Where do we start? </a>

1. Lets establish some ground rules.
2. We need infrastructure
  * Wiki for community communication
  * Repository for packages
    * Probably we can host it on the GNU servers
  * Mailing lists?
    * gnu-system-discuss is already there and should be used for most technical stuff
    * We might want some less formal channel for community stuff etc. in addition
      * I disagree, GSD is small and splitting the traffic into 2 lists is just silly at this point. -andrew
        * It's not about traffic but about intimidating. Some people/topics/opinions just do not fit the "official" channel, and shouldn't get voiced down by the "officials"
        * But well, maybe IRC is enough for the less formal stuff...
  * IRC channel?
    * As this is closely related to the Hurd, probably we shoud just use the established #hug and ##hurd
  * Bug / Issue tracking
    * Probably we should set up a Savannah project
  * How to handle experimental patches to the core packages (Hurd, Mach, libc etc.) that are not in official CVS yet?
3. We need a community vision and direction.
  * Lets work together for a common goal
  * Lets establish goals and priorities and get resources on them. (More later)
    * Major goal to create a system making full use of Hurd features?
      * We should never hesitate to throw away existing stuff whenever it hinders us to make good use of Hurd features
      * However, we should try to reuse existing stuff (from Debian for example) as long as it doesn't limit our possibilities or impose considerable overhead
  * Lets have fun. It's GNU and it's important but let's enjoy ourselves.

## <a name="What_are_we_missing_"> What are we missing? </a>

1. Tools
  * RPC Trace
2. Installer
  * Native installer would be preferred but we can bootstrap GNU/Linux for now if necessary
3. Package Management
  * There is a proposal to use stowfs. Let's get this going and test it out. Can it be made to work? How long will it take?

## <a name="Moving_forward_"> Moving forward? </a>

1. AMS had made a GNU release. We can try it and test it to good use. We can fix broken things in it, and enhance it.
  * The snapshot is very old. Probably better to build something from current stuff, even if it means more work
  * ams said that he would like to get a new snapshot out that would be on a Live CD and using stowfs. I think what we need to do is start using/fixing GSC to build packages for this effort.
2. GNU is all about freedom AND ease of use. So, given installers are by nature quite complex, how should we install GNU on users's computers? I think ams's GNU System Creator comes into play here, maybe ams or sdschulze could (re-)write specifications of GSC.
3. Until we have an installer ready, we could go the Gentoo-like route, and have every part manually installed. A good installation documentation may help. Our next milestone may be just this (in case ams hasn't already done it):
  * have a good installation document out, with all the required packages hosted at gnu.org or savannah.org
  * get stowfs working
4. Maybe try to use hacked Debian packages until we get native ones?
5. Move on, start coding, documenting, packaging.