This month Philip Charles created a new installation CD, the L series, for the Hurd, which brings us a big step towards installing the Hurd from the Hurd (without the need of a Linux-based installer). If you enjoy testing stuff, please give it a try.

On the same front, Michael Banck uploaded a new version of crosshurd that makes it again possible to use this package for creating a GNU/Hurd system image directly from Debian unstable packages.

Also, Thomas Schwinge migrated Sergiu Ivanov's nsmux, Flávio Cruz' cl-hurd (clisp bindings), and Carl Fredrik Hammar libchannel repositories into our new incubator Git repository, making them easier to access for other contributors.

Our bunch of porters continued to make further Debian packages usable on GNU/Hurd: Pino Toscano worked on a lot of packages, and Wesley W. Terpstra made mlton build -- together with Samuel Thibault, who first had to enhance GNU Mach to support allocating more than 1 GiB of RAM to one user-space process, which mlton needs.

On the go, Samuel also fixed a number of other bugs here and there, for example together with Eric Blake and Roland McGrath hashed out a difficile issue in the filesystem servers regarding POSIX conformance and system stability.

This month saw the successful completion of the Google Summer of Code 2009, for which Sergiu Ivanov created a unionmount translator. His work allows you to simply union one directory or translator into another one, so you see the files of both of them side by side.

He was mentored by Olaf Buddenhagen and both are now working on polishing the code and extending the namespace based translator selection (nsmux) which allows you to read a node with a selected translator by simply appending ,,<translator> to its name.

That aside, we saw the usual steady rate of enhancement discussions, as well as bugs getting fixed: X server crashing, preventing that GCC versions after 4.2 optimize too much, etc.

Samuel Thibault uploaded a new version of the hurd Debian package which improves system stability by fixing a long-standing bug in the exec server that had randomly made it hang, inhibiting the creation of new processes.

Sergiu Ivanov implemented most of the functionality of the union mount translator which allows combining the filesystem trees exported by several translators with the filesystem tree of the underlying node (in contrast to a pure unionfs, which won't do that). The patches are currently undergoing testing and review on the bug-hurd mailing list. This work is being done as a Google Summer of Code project, and we're happy to tell that Sergiu successfully passed the project's midterm evaluation.

Also, Zheng Da fixed a bug in GNU Mach's BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) implementation and contributed a number of fixes and improvements for rpctrace which should help further debugging.

Aside from looking for new contributors all the time, here is another job opening that doesn't require specific Hurd knowledge: we're seeking someone interested in writing a regression test suite for Hurd components.

This month Thomas Schwinge finished migrating the main Hurd, GNU Mach, MIG, libpthread and unionfs to Git. You can find the new repositories at http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/.

Also, he made libpthread buildable stand-alone by separating its build system from the Hurd's.

Additionally, Olaf Buddenhagen wrote a usability report about his experience with the GNU Hurd for everyday work.