* [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix @ 2007-06-28 13:29 Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-28 16:59 ` Uriel 2007-06-28 21:08 ` Roman Shaposhnick 0 siblings, 2 replies; 7+ messages in thread From: Enrico Weigelt @ 2007-06-28 13:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs Hi folks, I'd like to take some concepts of plan9 (ie. running servlets via 9P2000) to unix and other platforms. One contineously headache-causing application is Mozilla. It had become too fat, quite unmaintainable, indeterministic and often hanging. There's an project called nspluginwrapper which runs plugins in it's own process (invented to get binary crap like flash or acroread running on non-x86_32 platforms). For now it uses an (undocumened) unix-socket protocol for communication between browser and external plugin. Seems like a good starting point for showing the power of 9P2000 to the wide world ;-P The idea is: the browser exports an fs with the standard plan9 graphical window and some additional (browser-specific) services. So from the view of the "plugin" (which now becomes an separate application), it's place in the browser is an graphical terminal with perhaps some additional features. I'm not yet confident enough w/ 9p programming and seeking for help. Would anylone like to help me ? cu -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-28 13:29 [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix Enrico Weigelt @ 2007-06-28 16:59 ` Uriel 2007-06-28 18:32 ` Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-28 21:08 ` Roman Shaposhnick 1 sibling, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread From: Uriel @ 2007-06-28 16:59 UTC (permalink / raw) To: weigelt, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs This is an excellent idea, and one example of where 9P can work as a language and architecture agnostic application interface. You might want to look into the GSoC project to write an Inferno plugin for Mozilla, I am afraid it doesn't have its own page in http://gsoc.cat-v.org/projects/ yet, but bnext has posted about it in the blog http://gsoc.cat-v.org/blog/ and he was discussing his work in #plan9-gsoc just yesterday, so you might want to join and talk with him about some coordination. Best wishes uriel On 6/28/07, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > > I'd like to take some concepts of plan9 (ie. running servlets via > 9P2000) to unix and other platforms. > > One contineously headache-causing application is Mozilla. It had > become too fat, quite unmaintainable, indeterministic and often > hanging. There's an project called nspluginwrapper which runs > plugins in it's own process (invented to get binary crap like > flash or acroread running on non-x86_32 platforms). For now it > uses an (undocumened) unix-socket protocol for communication > between browser and external plugin. Seems like a good starting > point for showing the power of 9P2000 to the wide world ;-P > > The idea is: the browser exports an fs with the standard plan9 > graphical window and some additional (browser-specific) services. > So from the view of the "plugin" (which now becomes an separate > application), it's place in the browser is an graphical terminal > with perhaps some additional features. > > I'm not yet confident enough w/ 9p programming and seeking for > help. Would anylone like to help me ? > > > cu > -- > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: > http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce > Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: > http://patches.metux.de/ > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-28 16:59 ` Uriel @ 2007-06-28 18:32 ` Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-29 1:12 ` Roman Shaposhnik 0 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread From: Enrico Weigelt @ 2007-06-28 18:32 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs * Uriel <uriel99@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, > This is an excellent idea, and one example of where 9P can work as a > language and architecture agnostic application interface. Thanks to the list folks, I've got some libs and examples for writing servlets. :) I'm going to fork out the libs to their own, pkg-config'ed packages. Now I need some client library to access 9p2000 services from userland. The userland applications, ie. mozilla should import that library and acess the services through it. Services be represented by some line of text (ie. an URI). Any suggestion ? > You might want to look into the GSoC project to write an Inferno > plugin for Mozilla, In fact, I do not yet know what Inferno actually is (didn't have the time to try it out yet). Is it something like the Oberon runtime system ? BTW: I don't intend to write any "plugin" for mozilla. I actually want to away from that crap. The destiny is to heavily trim down the mozilla tree and move out as much as possile to generic separate packages. Before I know Plan9, my idea was to move things like bookmarks handling to an separate (plain-C) library. That library should provide an quite generic interface, so it could be used by virtually any browser or similar application. Several storages should be provided by (optional) backends. Traditonal "bookmark.html" and LDAP should be only a few of them. Collaborative bookmarking (which is currently done by mozilla specifc extensions) should also be dropped in there. Now that I learned the simplicity of Plan9, all we need is an cross platform 9P2000 client library and clean model for the bookmark fs. AFAIK IE's and KDE's approaches go some bit in that direction (at least they've got one file per bookmark), but still not far enough. Many people have objections against splitting such things into dozens of micro-files, ie. because not to waste OS resources. With an minimalistic userland 9p2000 client and appropriate servlets, we not just get it down, but also have an very simple interface to support virtally any kind of bookmark storage. Also the trouble of "profile sharing" (in other words: multiple access) would be trivial to solve. Not to mention dozens of other problems this solved. Having a quick look at Mozilla's bookmarks.html. If we want an similar storage with "flat" files, we just need something like this: * the root directory contains some dir "bookmarks", which represents top level bookmark dir. (we dont use / for that to have space for adding other things, ie. query interfaces, later) * an bookmark is just an plain file with some random name and some fixed extension, ".B". (other extensions later could be introduced for other things). inside the bm file we've just lines which look like rfc822 (mail) headers. Non-ascii content is url-encoded. * folders are specially marked subdirs, ie. with ".F" extension. additional metadata could be stored in an "INFO" file, also encoded like the bookmark files. Well that would be all. Mozilla's bookmark handling would be rewritten to just access this hierachy, via the 9p2000 client library. cu -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-28 18:32 ` Enrico Weigelt @ 2007-06-29 1:12 ` Roman Shaposhnik 2007-06-29 11:41 ` Enrico Weigelt 0 siblings, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread From: Roman Shaposhnik @ 2007-06-29 1:12 UTC (permalink / raw) To: weigelt, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs Hi On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 20:32 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > AFAIK IE's and KDE's approaches go some bit in that direction > (at least they've got one file per bookmark), but still not far > enough. Many people have objections against splitting such things > into dozens of micro-files, ie. because not to waste OS resources. > With an minimalistic userland 9p2000 client and appropriate servlets, > we not just get it down, but also have an very simple interface to > support virtally any kind of bookmark storage. Also the trouble of > "profile sharing" (in other words: multiple access) would be trivial > to solve. Not to mention dozens of other problems this solved. To me, the biggest advantage of the architecture you seem to have in mind is that it becomes extra easy to access and manipulate those objects (e.g. bookmarks, visited pages, etc.) from outside of the Mozilla. Grepping through the recently visited pages seems to be quite useful at times. Thanks, Roman. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-29 1:12 ` Roman Shaposhnik @ 2007-06-29 11:41 ` Enrico Weigelt 0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread From: Enrico Weigelt @ 2007-06-29 11:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs * Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote: Hi, > To me, the biggest advantage of the architecture you seem to have > in mind is that it becomes extra easy to access and manipulate > those objects (e.g. bookmarks, visited pages, etc.) from outside > of the Mozilla. Yep. That's one side of the story: using some universal storage and integrating with lots of other applications or sharing between several instances over the net will be quite trivial. The oder side is simplicity: Mozilla really suffers from quite unmaintainable code. Nobody really sees through, and the whole blob is nearly undebuggable. People invent really sick "solutions" to non-problems (ie. the mork "database"-format) and avoid really necessary radical cleanups / refactoring. My first plan (back several years) was to move out one thing by another into separate (mozilla independent!) libs. This of course would work, but compared with the simplicity of an virtual fs it's just a waste of resources. With an clean and simple model, the fs can handle 90% of the tasks by itself, and from that point we can do all these nice things which can be done with an fs (ie. sharing over the net). Mozilla folks are working on other solutions which were meant to go in a similar direction (ie. generalized db api, mork, sqlite) for quite a long time (AFIAK in FF 3.x, sqlite should be standard), but they all are additional features, the old crap will still be carried for a long time. I really wonder, how they can seriously think about embedded targets in such an sitation ;-O cu -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-28 13:29 [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-28 16:59 ` Uriel @ 2007-06-28 21:08 ` Roman Shaposhnick 2007-06-28 21:29 ` Francisco J Ballesteros 1 sibling, 1 reply; 7+ messages in thread From: Roman Shaposhnick @ 2007-06-28 21:08 UTC (permalink / raw) To: weigelt, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 15:29 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > The idea is: the browser exports an fs with the standard plan9 > graphical window and some additional (browser-specific) services. > So from the view of the "plugin" (which now becomes an separate > application), it's place in the browser is an graphical terminal > with perhaps some additional features. You should really take a look at Plan B work that Nemo's team has been doing: http://lsub.org/ls/planb.html Thanks, Roman. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix 2007-06-28 21:08 ` Roman Shaposhnick @ 2007-06-28 21:29 ` Francisco J Ballesteros 0 siblings, 0 replies; 7+ messages in thread From: Francisco J Ballesteros @ 2007-06-28 21:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs There are several things that we are not going to implement soon, that any other one could take, should it be interesting. One is to implement other viewers for omero (in Inferno), so that a different kind of feel (eg., one for non-programmers) could be available. Another one is to write a unix library compatible with a popular widget interface, but running against omero instead of using X. That way, unix apps using that inferface could exploit both inferno and omero. There are more ideas, but we're quite busy right now with the octopus in general. In particular, omero for the octopus and a silly paper is getting 90% of my time. Thought I should say this, just in case :) On 6/28/07, Roman Shaposhnick <rvs@sun.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 15:29 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > > The idea is: the browser exports an fs with the standard plan9 > > graphical window and some additional (browser-specific) services. > > So from the view of the "plugin" (which now becomes an separate > > application), it's place in the browser is an graphical terminal > > with perhaps some additional features. > > You should really take a look at Plan B work that Nemo's team > has been doing: > http://lsub.org/ls/planb.html > > Thanks, > Roman. > > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 7+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2007-06-29 11:41 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 7+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2007-06-28 13:29 [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-28 16:59 ` Uriel 2007-06-28 18:32 ` Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-29 1:12 ` Roman Shaposhnik 2007-06-29 11:41 ` Enrico Weigelt 2007-06-28 21:08 ` Roman Shaposhnick 2007-06-28 21:29 ` Francisco J Ballesteros
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