Planet Debian recently featured a post by Obey Arthur Liu about the Google Summer of Code.
The section about the Debian GNU/Hurd port by Jérémie Koenig especially interested me. It included work on a cross-platform Busybox port and the "de-Linux-ization" of the Debian installer, which will definitely help other ports:
What about the possibility of using a different set of userland tools besides the GNU tools? Perhaps we'll see a port like this:
Who knows??
I also found the section about Config::Model very cool as well. I'm very interested to see how this project coordinates with etckeeper, Augeas, and Puppet.