[Soc-coordination] Weekly report (11th week) - Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization

[Justus Winter]

Quoting Samuel Thibault (2013-08-30 20:24:15)
> heroxbd at gentoo.org, le Sat 31 Aug 2013 01:08:31 +0900, a écrit :
> > So I'd like to hear your and the hurd team's opinion towards OpenRC.
> 
> I guess you should probably work together to fix any OpenRC issue.

I actually looked at OpenRC briefly on Monday and wrote a mail
(Message-ID: <20130826180841.5205.41955 at thinkbox.jade-hamburg.de>),
but it never made it to the bug-hurd list archive for some
reason... well, here it is again (if it reached you, please excuse me
spamming you ;):

Quoting heroxbd (2013-05-28 05:10:57)
> Our project is about to Debianize OpenRC[1], a candidate replacement for
> /etc/init.d/rc originated from Gentoo written in C and POSIX
> shell. OpenRC is created with portability in mind and it runs on FreeBSD
> port of Gentoo.

Right, so I gave OpenRC a quick spin. It fails to compile on Hurd, I
did some hacky patching, made up some .GNU.x files to make the build
system start doing it's job. All went fairly well until it hit
src/librc:

* Unconditional use of both PATH_MAX and MAXPATHLEN

* For some reason BSD is defined and so it expects some headers that
  are not available on the Hurd

* Afaics it assumes kvm to be available, at this point I stopped
  hacking around the issues.

So I think this would need some serious porting by someone who is more
familiar with OpenRC or has more time to conditionalize the code using
the various features that are not available on the Hurd.

Justus