9fans archive / 1997 / 08 / 37 /    prev next

From: Boyd Roberts boyd@fra...
Subject: [9fans] Re: Anyone still running plan9?
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 10:11:49 +0200

    From: Brandon Black <photon@nol.net>

    It really irks me a little that so many people want *nix ports of Plan 9's
    window manager, or editor, etc... but nobody wants to take the really
    great ideas.  WHy won't somebody take things like the namespacing stuff,
    the 9P and IL protocols, the fileserver/cpuserver/terminal concepts...

i would have loved to have put 9p into ultrix several years ago, but
decided that it was just not worth the pain.  anyone who's keen on
retrofitting cool stuff into modern unix kernels either a) hasn't seen
one, b) doesn't understand the problem, or c) has too much time on
their hands (cue denis leary).  maybe all three.

btw:  i class that ghastly mess, known as linux, as a 'modern unix kernel'.
      you may have the code to it, but have you actually read it?

bbtw: ultrix supported nfs mounts by mortals, so i decided to implement
      ftpfs with nfs.  it just wasn't worth the effort.  i wound up with
      a sort of neat toy, but useless.  i spent several weeks on it, much
      of it wasted trying to understand why nfs did what it did, trying
      to turn it into some sort of reliable tool.  i was no stranger to
      nfs, having ported it back in '86.  but how it actually behaved
      was pretty sad.