Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > So we should wait another 5? 10? 20 years? before someone makes a
   > solid decision and one decides that we should just throw away a bunch
   > of years worth of work?  If anything, that is what is not productive,
   > it is also not productive to work on two code bases at the same time.

   So says you.  Nobody is suggesting you should work on two at the same
   time.

   Really, this is kind of vapid.  

   I tell my students, who are invariably shocked, that when they
   write a paper they should expect to throw away as much prose as
   they include in the final paper.

Your students have it easier, they know what to work on: the paper on
a specific topic. That is a specific goal, `the Hurd' has no such
goal, is it Hurd/Mach, Hurd/L4 or what?  You say that you don't know,
I don't know.  What do you tell a student who has been writting his
final paper a while now, and then after having worked on it for a
while, you tell him that this isn't what he was supposed to write
about and has now to start from scratch since initally you told him to
do his own thing?