From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <011f01c0c9dd$2ccc5d40$e0b6c6d4@SOMA> From: "Boyd Roberts" To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> References: <20010420075428.A6221@cackle.proxima.alt.za> <007201c0c994$81ad3990$e0b6c6d4@SOMA> <20010420163931.A6978@cackle.proxima.alt.za> Subject: Re: [9fans] Publish and be damned. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:02:13 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 87a8c902-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 From: "Lucio De Re" > I have an unfinished game (mastermind or bulls and cows) for Plan > 9 I threw together to get a feeling for the graphics. I am reluctant > to post it as it stands because of the personal involvement, possible > criticism, any number of embarrassments due to the unfinished nature > of the program. no, the 'owner' of the code gives you the url. the url points at the version that the 'owner' is prepared to release. the url should point at a 'portable' single file. no 5k tarred (sic) zipped nonsense. use bundle: http://www.planete.net/~boyd/code/bundle.html and if it's large, and only then, then compress it. you just maintain a chunk of pages with a chunk of urls. you could code it in a few hours with the shell of your choice. look at: http://www.planete.net/~boyd/code/mkthumb it doesn't do what you want, but its exhibits the principle. this is a lot faster to write and use than some random piece of junk on windows/unix/linux etc and is reasonably portable across bourne shells that support shell functions. see how it goes, and then, and only then go for a more complex solution. there's no point wasting time writing 3 zillion lines of C for something that turned out to be a bad idea, when you could of worked it out with a rapid prototype. IIRC plan 9 was an experiment that came out of a research lab and in response to the question what they for version control, well was: /n/dump on that topic i built a version of /n/dump using a program (to call ftw(3) and stat(2)) and some scripts (to select and copy the files) when i was at PRL. as fast as i could free up RA90's [1GB] i was headed to have the last ~30 days of all the user's home directories on mag disc. presented it as a WIP at a USENIX -- hell, ken, with phil in tow, walked in. on top of that ran the normal backups. my version of /n/dump was there for when someone blew away a file that they'd created recently so they could go and get it themselves with cd, ls and cp. if i had decided to write this thing in C it woulda taken months and months more to debug; stuff that plays with time breaks when it's time for it to break. fixing a broken 'case' statement is a lot easier than wading through hundreds or more lines of C. speed was not an issue, 'cos it was basically i/o bound. anyway, you can fix that later. been there, seen that, got the bowling shirt ...