9fans archive / 2000 / 05 / 62 /    prev next

From: forsyth@vit... forsyth@vit...
Subject: [9fans] Re: Are the Infernospaces gone?
Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 15:39:39 BST

yorvic.york.ac.uk!caves asks:
>Or have I just reinvented inferno?

i'd say the need for it or something like it hasn't gone away.

>forsyth@cal... wrote:
>> <snip>
>> The most useful aspect of Infernospaces (from our point of view outside)
>> was that it incorporated non-Inferno systems into an Inferno world
>> without having to have them run Inferno.  
><snip>

my posting to comp.os.inferno unfortunately had some ambiguous prepositions,
i was also a little too subtle in my wording, and unfortunately, you
didn't quote the whole thing here, so that sentence gives quite the wrong
impression out of context, namely that i thought there was something wrong
about `having to have [non-Inferno systems] run Inferno', which would be silly
of me, given that the hosted mode was one of the key points about Inferno!

generally, I (or we, really since it includes others at Vita Nuova)
take the view that InfernoSpaces was simultaneously too little and too much.
It was `too much' for small devices, where (by contrast) 9p/styx looks fine,
and offered `too little' beyond that really to improve the structuring, implementation
and portability of cross-platform applications.   uncomfortable all round.
in the Inferno/Plan9 milieu Vita hopes to provide things that more effectively attack
the limited part of the problem where (we thought) InfernoSpaces meant well.