9fans archive / 1998 / 10 / 66 /    prev next

From: steve_kilbane@ceg... steve_kilbane@ceg...
Subject: [9fans] 8.5 for NT available ?
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:44:36 +0100

On 21/10/98 21:21:00 steve Simon  wrote:

> The NT version of the rc shell does not notice when many (most ?) DOS
> commands exit so I can only use ls, cat, echo, rm, sort, fmt and wc -
This
> is a bit limiting.
<blink> my version of sam must be fairly old; don't recall getting any
extras with it. Maybe I didn't notice...

> Is anyone working on a 9WM like program for NT, or even know if it is
> possible (without breaking support for MSOffice and the like)?
<OBDIG>Support for MSOffice comes broken out of the box</OBDIG>

More seriously, I don't think a 9wm interface would work on NT. I know that
it doesn't work well for a lot of X programs, that expect auto-placement of
windows.

I suspect that a better solution would be an acme-style port program,
because that's more self-contained (it's solving a different problem,
though). I can envisage something like acme plus a sensible scripting
language being a good basis for a toolchest approach to NT. I'd recommend
Perl as a good language, because it's got NT libraries, works well, and
doesn't assume a GUI. I know some people consider it ugly, but this _is_ an
NT solution we're talking about.

> I suppose it all comes down to asking if there is any chance of getting a
> copy of the Plan9 compatibility C library that was used to port the above
> utils - object only would do though source would be nice :-) This way I
> could recompile my Plan9 sources myself.
There's been some work on distributing Wily and libXg separately on the
wilyfans list - that would be a good basis for any NT port, but I'd expect
them to need some *major* rewriting. Once that's sorted, most of Wily
should move across quite simply (by comparison). Just the IPC stuff would
cause problems, and that's simpler than porting acme, with its file
interface...

steve