From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <0beaa8f299b645c6f9a31874ba08c7db@plan9.bell-labs.com> From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Essay: Is network transparency something bad? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 13:08:27 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0c195886-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 I had very little to do with the design of Plan 9, but... I think the right statement of his complaint is that systems should not ignore the difference between remote and local resources. Having different interfaces is one way to force system programmers to keep the difference foremost in their minds. What he doesn't address is that doing so limits the generality of your tools. Typical Plan 9 configurations don't go and grab this resource from that machine and on and on -- most resources are local -- but when you _want_ to, say, replace your /net with someone else's /net, it's really nice that all your tools still just work. I agree with the premise (that you shouldn't ignore the difference), but not the conclusion that it's up to the system designer to enforce discipline on the users and other programmers. The argument is something like - people do stupid things with x - let's not anyone do x and the fallacy is that if you know what you're doing it's very useful to do x. Why tie your own hands behind your back just so that people have to find some other way to do stupid things? Russ