Re: [9fans] bell-labs website and plan9

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On 4/9/07, Devon H. O'Dell <devon.odell@gmail.com> wrote:
>  I've asked you several times off-list about the status of
> Python and hg and getting these to work, but I haven't received a
> response yet, so I don't know if you got them.

I owe you an apology for that ... I'm sorry. What I've been trying to
do is find a way to apply $$$ to someone to
1) get my python stuff reworked in a more correct fashion
2) get the work done to put that code back in the mainstream.

This has not happened as soon as I might have hoped, because everyone
is (always) overworked.

I have put my python work to date at 9grid.net, I think this is it,
tell me if I screwed up!
http://9grid.net/magic/webls?dir=/rminnich/src

(and we should all ask andrey and aki to give us webls ... :-)

>Any
> information on the hg status and how one can help with that would be
> nice.

status: For Hg, I needed ssh2. We don't have it. So I got
paramiko-tools. It needed pycrypto. I got those. Pycrypto needed
multiple fixes to the Python port, which I made; I got the pycrypto
stuff to actually work. (and, along the way, realized that Python
plays C tricks that ought not to be played, but that's another story
... these Python C tricks required me to hack things so that
type-safety was set to "OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF") Then I prepared to
release it. Then I realized, that, me releasing crypto would be a
*really* *stupid* thing to do, given where I work and the state of
export control and so on and so forth. SO, ... I stopped.

Then you made me realize that I was being stupid, and should have
thought of Hg port in terms of file trees, not ssh, and now I have to
go look at this again. On plan 9, if you don't first do these tools
with either file trees or 9p, you are being dumb, and I was being dumb
in not thinking in those terms.

But, we still really need an ssh2 transport, at some point, because
that's what The Rest of The World, in their blindness, uses for most
of their Hg repos.

> As far as an SCM goes, it would be nice to have one, but I'm sure it
> has to run in Plan 9. The big problem that I have with hg and my own
> vcs is that neither is really suited for maintaining multiple
> branches.

Are you sure about Hg in this case? The xen tree is about the size of
the plan 9 kernel, for sure, and maybe all of /sys/src, and there are
lots of Xen trees out there. I have not used Hg enough to say, but my
observation is that it has worked well for xen in distributed repo
mode.

Thanks, and sorry I was so uncommunicative on the python stuff.

ron