Hurd Hackers meet this weekend

[प्रवीण् ए (Praveen A)]

Hi,

As a follow up to previous meetup we are meeting up this weekend (saturday)
to discuss some of the ideas to start hacking on Hurd. The place can be
cubbon park itself if anyone can bring a laptop with qemu. Otherwise we will
have to meet in a place where we can get a system (any college labs). We can
have an intro to Hurd session if students turn up.

Well these are the ideas I would like to work on

1. Filesystem as package manager

No need for a separate database and file format for packages.

/packages/meta - contains information about the available packages like
dependencies
/packages/binary - contains binary files from a package
/packages/source - source code files

unionfs will give a merged view of these package files in the / like /bin
/lib /var ...

so if you install a package from source like

./configure --prefix=/packages/binary/emacs ; make; make install
will have all the binary files in /packages/binary/emacs direcory and it
will be immediately available to everyone and it is recognised by the
packaging system wothout any other commands or configuration

to check whether you have emacs installed

ls /packages/binary/emacs is enough
to update the metadata rsync can be used

More details has to be thought of and finalised.

2. Filesystem as email client.

Use fetchmail to get email from server and use mboxfs to extract the email
info. Use any editor be it vi, emacs or gedit to read.

To write a mail we will use a write only file system. You just drag and drop
to a folder and the mail is sent. We can have this icon in the panel (the
traditional mail box makes sense here, you post it to the box and it is
gone).

3. Flexible backends for /etc/passwd file.

Use mysql, pgsql, ldap ... for authentication and create a translator for
/etc/passwd so than zero configuration is required for all other programmes.

If you have an idea, we can discuss that as well

Happy Hacking
Praveen

--
"Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history.
`Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn."
-- Richard Stallman
Me scribbles at http://www.pravi.co.nr
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