Re: A few other problems

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

Daniel Burrows wrote:
>   The translator documentation that you pointed to is a nice overview from a
> user's point of view, but I have (so far) been unable to work out how to
> actually *write* a translator.  (I also haven't had time for a month
> or two to try..)  Would it be possible for someone (preferably someone who
> knows something about this topic ;-) ) to write some quick documentation on
> how to write a very simple translator?  A "hello, world!" type of program,
> for example, would be very useful; perhaps a tiny translator that just prints
> the above message when 'cat'ed, or shows a file containing "Hello, world!"
> when "ls"'ed?

I have a hello world ready. You can use the libtrivfs for this type of
thing
and is really "trivial". ls is more difficult, as you need to provide
all
directory semantics. libdiskfs is helping here.

I will post my hello world later.
 
>   I'd try typing something up, but aside from the problem of not knowing when
> I'll have time, there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here..

Oh come on. Did you ever read some of the examples in the Hurd source
tree?
It's not as if you had to reinvent the translator concept :)

The real problem with translaters is the multithreading and asynchrous
IO, as well
as the core stuff (as most translator stuff is already available
throught the Hurd libs).

Thanks,
Marcus