[mdlug] Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[Jacob Todd]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 01:28:52PM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > So, has anyone else ever heard of this or used it? Here's[2] most of the papers
> > and here[3] is the official website in case anyone is interested.
> 
> I think the Plan 9 project has been at least moribund for a long time,
> and is probably dead.  Plan 9 is the perfect example [agreed on by just
> about everyone] of solution-in-search-of-a-problem. 
I don't know what the hell you are talking about, but just about every
time I start up my qemu image of plan 9 I get updates to a fair amount of files.
There's a decent size community of people that develope programs for p9, they
usually just don't advertise it until it's finished. And I doubt anyone agrees
that p9 is a 'perfect example of solution-in-search-of-a-problem'; whatever
that may be.

> Numerous bits from
> Plan 9 like clone and /proc have been assimilated into various other
> operating systems.  If I recall correctly Plan 9's big 'feature' was
> everything-is-a-filesystem.  Only all abstractions are leaky and there
> really is no compelling reason to deal with the leaks in order to
> pretend that some resource is a file or filesystem. 
What exactly is 'leaky'? You don't seem to know what you're talking about, and
seem to have never used p9 for more than a few moments.

> One of the biggest
> gripes against UN*X was the 'arbitrary' ioctl() call but both BSD and
> LINUX have effectively eliminated those.
I can't speak about the BSD's, but I know Linux uses ioctl() all the time. I
don't know who told you that Linux 'effectively eliminated those' 

-- 
Jake Todd
// If it isn't broke, tweak it!
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