[9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Andrew Hudson]

> slashdot is also the only place where people would be commenting how
> restrictive the Plan 9 license is (sometimes even referring to the
> 1995 one, not even the 2000 one) while slamming the OS for not being
> up-to-date with whatever the current fashions are. yesterday's
> discussion was similar to a bunch of lemmings running around screaming
> "persistent objects! persistent objects!"... it must be that the 20
> year cycle has gotten us back to the days of OO again.
>
Let me state the obvious here. Firstly, you should never take anything
said on Slashdot personally. It's an anonymous flame factory with a
high signal to noise ratio. People flame anonymously, without
accountability. It is however the primary source of technical news for
a huge number of geeks around the world. So it's great to get your
news onto the forum. That's where I was introduced to Plan 9 V4.

Secondly, you shouldn't address mis-information with a flame, but in a
positive, professional, and helpful manner. No one, but no one likes
misguided zealots. No one likes the Mac fanatics, no one likes Linux
fanboys, and no one likes Plan 9 wackos. Consider yourself a
professional and an ambassador in all your forum postings. Remember
that your posts are read around the world by many people and will
remain archived long after your bad mood has passed.

A single flaming post may give you satisfaction for a few minutes but
the damage to your project lasts a long time. A well-though posting
spreads good karma and encourages others to do the same.

- Andrew

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Ronald G Minnich]

First, Andrew, thanks for getting us on OS News. Yeah, your article was
not perfect, but, as a number of us have pointed out, we didn't exactly
get off our collective duffs and write anything ourselves, now, did we?

I view your efforts as a net plus ...

Andrew Hudson wrote:

> Secondly, you shouldn't address mis-information with a flame, but in a
> positive, professional, and helpful manner.

Just a comment on this. Every once in a while, there is a slashdot
article about linuxbios. I created linuxbios, so I know a thing or two
about it. Any time I try to correct some of the more ridiculuous
statements ("Why not just use Open Firmware? It's open source!" is
typical) my post gets rated a 5 (boring). It could be partly due to my
official status as a Boring Person, but still, ...

Slashdot reviewing filters for  cute, pithy, relatively
information-free, sound-bite quality replies. It's great for 6 o'clock
news-style writing. It's about as accurate. You might argue that it's
better than nothing -- it's not, it's worse than nothing -- it
frequently does damage by propagating misinformation. There's a certain
irony in the fact that the Children of the Information Age, Creators of
the Information Superhighway, Denizens of Cyberspace, have built a
popular web side that creates so much misinformation, and in general
does no better a job with the news than Mr. and Ms. Cutie-Pie on the TV
News.

> A well-though posting
> spreads good karma and encourages others to do the same.

well, maybe :-) I like the theory :-)

A few other things:

Yep, the web pages are not great. There are lots of dead links. We need
a web dude, but they are really hard to find. It's a pain in those same
duffs we sit on while we're not writing osnews articles ... it also
suggests that the Web, as an information storage medium, has some real
problems.

as to the environment. I will make people mad here -- I already upset
people by adding a few emacs keybindings to Acme (I also got some real
thank you's). I sat down with a very good CS person who  pointed out
some of the ways in which the desktop could, and should, be more
internally consistent. And, there are many enough of them to be
annoying. People get stymied in unnecessary ways and give up.

It's this kind of thing that puts off Plan 9 (potential) users. I've
seen it happen, again and again, over really trivial issues. They don't
stay intrigued enough to explore the real beauty of the system. I think
it's a shame.

Plan 9 needs to be more subversive. Were any one thing a little bit
familiar, people would have an easier time. But Plan 9 requires a
"mental world swap", and people are not ready for it in most cases.
No vi. No emacs. No gcc. No firefox ... I've heard all these complaints,
over and over again, in 5 years.

Plus, people see no compelling reason to put in the effort to cut over,
and that's also a shame. I talked to an OS buzzard at Cray a few weeks
ago -- he was as old as me! He used Plan 9 at sequent. He was put off by
the mouse-oriented editors and the fact that getpid required an
open/read/close of a file. Chickenshit stuff, right? Well, it meant the
end of looking at Plan 9 at more than one company, sadly.

Unix was interesting in the sense of being subversive. Taken from almost
any point of view, Unix was a far better OS than ANY of the PDP-11 OSes
at the time -- I know, I used them all -- and so the case for cutting
over to it was pretty strong. Plus, it was very familiar to people --
same GUI -- the Teletype. The paper tape. An editor you typed at. It
wasn't until you really got into it that you found out how much more
capable it was. It was subversive. You didn't know what you had gotten
into until AFTER you moved from RSX-11 to Unix.

Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
capable to be the only system one uses. It's a shame, because the
foundations of Plan 9 -- OS, windowing system, etc. -- are far more
capable than anything else out there. But -- the third party apps don't
exist. We can't do javascript.

So, is it the case that any new OS, that is not Windows or MAC or X11
compatible, is doomed, due to third party apps? I hope not, but my uses
of Plan 9 are now tending to areas in which third party apps don't
matter so much -- supercomputing and distributed sensor networks. And,
it's working. I demo'd the DSN system 10 days ago and people really
liked it. There are compelling reasons to use Plan 9 in a distributed
sensor network as opposed to Linux or other such systems.

As to the "LLNL connection". Yep, it's LANL. And Yep, our web pages Suck
-- my fault. It's just a lot of work to maintain that kind of thing, and
we are overloaded. And, on Plan 9, there is no decent web page editor
(third party apps, remember?). But we are funded for at least 18 more
months for a number of interesting things:
1) plan 9 as a foundation for supercomputers with 100,000 CPUs
2) plan 9 for distributed sensor networks

and we did help a few things happen, although some we have not done as
well as we would have liked
1) 9grid.net (we get a C on that -- maybe an F)
2) port to 64-bit kernel, compiler, etc. (jmk and forsyth did the real
work -- I just got them the $$$) (we get an A here for getting money :-)
3) we had a little bit to do with the license getting fixed in 2003.
	(A for effort ... it worked out)

we're trying. It's a bitch -- like refloating an almost sunken ship.
But, it beats living in a world in which the only two OSes are Unix and
Windows. I just wish more people could write code.

thanks

ron

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[csant]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
wrote:

> Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
> spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
> system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
> capable to be the only system one uses.

Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps": what exactly
is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?

/c

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[John Floren]

On 7/24/06, csant <csant@csant.info> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
> wrote:
>
> > Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
> > spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
> > system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
> > capable to be the only system one uses.
>
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
> else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps": what exactly
> is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?
>
> /c
>
I make frequent use of the evil spreadsheet at work. We do a lot of
data collection, so we need something of that sort. It's probably
missing because implementing an Excel-alike is "boring" and somehow
against "the Plan 9 way".


John
--
TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)

[9fans] missing applications

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> I make frequent use of the evil spreadsheet at work. We do a lot of
> data collection, so we need something of that sort. It's probably
> missing because implementing an Excel-alike is "boring" and somehow
> against "the Plan 9 way".

There are at least a couple of relatively simple spread sheet programs
written in C that should port with minimal pain.  None of them is suitable
if you use your spreadsheet as a typesetter.

--lyndon

Re: [9fans] missing applications

[John Floren]

On 7/24/06, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> > I make frequent use of the evil spreadsheet at work. We do a lot of
> > data collection, so we need something of that sort. It's probably
> > missing because implementing an Excel-alike is "boring" and somehow
> > against "the Plan 9 way".
>
> There are at least a couple of relatively simple spread sheet programs
> written in C that should port with minimal pain.  None of them is suitable
> if you use your spreadsheet as a typesetter.
>
> --lyndon
>
Yes, I was just now thinking of the "sc" spreadsheet program. It's a
curses-based thing that runs on Linux (it's in Slackware for sure).
Porting something may be the way to go.

John
--
TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)

Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Harri Haataja]

I can't quite imagine and list all the things that would be needed
before I could switch desktops. I'm sure I would be flexible with a lot
of things.

A few immediate things that appear to stop me from even trying to keep
plan9 on the side other than as a curiousity:

- Good tiling window management. I won't go back to handling any window
  borders with a mouse.
- Threaded news & mail reader(s).
- Yes, a web browser, as I read a lot. No need for more features than
  eg dillo has. I'm aware this may already exist. But an easy way to
  edit (real) wiki's and throw text into them from other web pages would
  be neccessary. As a dream, a browser with decent editing in forms :)
- Perhaps something like tor, a filtering proxy, NNTP leaf node, NAT for
  others, neat (snmp?) monitoring apps, packet filtering etc might be a
  way to sneak it to some lone servers.

Outside that, good terminal emulation with ssh would be one bridge I'm
not sure that is available. I didn't find an irc client that wasn't a
complete mess to use either. But I haven't looked too deeply. So far,
Inferno has seemed more interesting as there's a much lower threshold in
running that. It is a fair deal of work to dig yourself into that, too.

--
Java is a WORA language! (Write Once, Run Away)
	-- James Vandenberg (on progstone@egroups.com)
	   & quoted by David Rush on
	   comp.lang.scheme

Re: Re: [9fans] missing applications

[David Leimbach]

> Outside that, good terminal emulation with ssh would be one bridge I'm
> not sure that is available. I didn't find an irc client that wasn't a
> complete mess to use either. But I haven't looked too deeply. So far,
> Inferno has seemed more interesting as there's a much lower threshold in
> running that. It is a fair deal of work to dig yourself into that, too.
>

I use "vt" and "ssh" all the time.  Works pretty darned well for what
I need, when I need to get to a unix box and work directly.

I agree Inferno is a "low investment" Plan 9-like option.  It's also
really interesting in that it has a great programming language.

There are a few IRC clients for Plan 9, I found ircrc to be good,
there was another that used a /srv/ based approach that would allow
one to attach and detach from an acme driven win session with ease.
But honestly, I don't use IRC anywhere near as much as I used to.

Dave

> --
> Java is a WORA language! (Write Once, Run Away)
>         -- James Vandenberg (on progstone@egroups.com)
>            & quoted by David Rush on
>            comp.lang.scheme
>

Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Robert Raschke]

> - Good tiling window management. I won't go back to handling any window
>   borders with a mouse.

As others have already pointed out, you can run acme without running
rio.  So, after starting vga, just run acme instead of rio.  (Someone
recently made a nice Inferno package for Windows that runs acme in
exactly that way.  Best editor I've used on Windows.  Ever.)

> - Threaded news & mail reader(s).

I also like threaded news, so I munged the acme News reader in an
extremely naive way.  You can find it under /n/sources/contrib/r.raschke/ .

Robby

Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Sascha Retzki]

> - Good tiling window management. I won't go back to handling any window
>   borders with a mouse.

Hm, I find that one a bit funny. I actually enjoy that - maybe I missed the latest news in the control-windows-with-vi-like-keys technologies(tm) (yeah I tried wmi once)?

A full-screen button is the only thing that I miss sometimes. Pressing a key and acme is fullscreen ;)

A mouse is a damn intuitiv interface as it behaves pretty much like a single finger. imho

> - Threaded news & mail reader(s).

Those always confused me - I hate it.


> - Perhaps something like tor,

I did not check, but I guess they just enculapse a e.g. TCP/IP-paket into $something? Sounds like a /net-like fs can do the trick then.

> a filtering proxy,

What's that? Squid? What do you filter? What protocol? Pakets or content of pakets?

> NAT for others,

Yeah. See my post about it. ;)

> neat (snmp?) monitoring apps,

I recall gabriel (sorry, are you spelled that way?) has done something wrt SNMP. No idea if it is neat.


> packet filtering etc might be a way to sneak it to some lone servers.

9pf!!

Paket filtering is your last security wall - proper updates, an infrastructure with security in mind etc are the first things to be done. Furthermore, as you statted, Plan9 ain't really work as a 'router' (no NAT etc) in an environment where you need such thing. Anyway, I agree paket filtering would be usefull.

>
> Outside that, good terminal emulation with ssh would be one bridge I'm
> not sure that is available.

vt(1) works for me(tm). Okay, I just occassionally edit config files with vi and normally just use vt and ssh to shut machines down ;)

> I didn't find an irc client that wasn't a complete mess to use either.

I enjoy using irc7[0]. The 'server' posts a file in /srv and the clients connect to that - a nice solution as you can now start up ircsrv and then start a 'win' for every channel you want to be in (in acme I mean) and then do irc -t '#channel'

There is also Acme-irc (Irc) which basicly does the same - create several acme windows for each channel. Never worked for me on plan9, I was told it was done for P9P. In the end I did not care enough and just used irc7.



[0]:  9fs sources ; cp /n/sources/contrib/andrey/irc7.tgz $home

Re: Re: [9fans] missing applications

[David Leimbach]

> A full-screen button is the only thing that I miss sometimes. Pressing a key and acme is fullscreen ;)

One could presumably write such a thing using the rio filesystem
already... in fact when I start plan 9 I get a stripe with "winwatch
-e winwatch" in it and 3 sub-rio sessions that fill in the rest of the
screen, but some of the offsets are currently hard-coded  and thusly
not dynamic at all to other changes.

It's nearly virtual desktop space.  (and winwatch only watches the rio
sessions, not the windows within them, good old private namespaces win
again for me here.)

Within a rio session I find I often want to expand a window to fill
the whole thing in as well.

Rio provides a good bit of mechanism, just not a ton of policy...
that's up to people to customize for themselves.  I once thought I had
a way to improve rio, I was wrong and Russ pointed out a way to do the
things I wanted to do with the filesystem.

Dave

Re: Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Harri Haataja]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 10:52:27AM -0700, David Leimbach wrote:
> >A full-screen button is the only thing that I miss sometimes.
> >Pressing a key and acme is fullscreen ;)
>
> One could presumably write such a thing using the rio filesystem
> already... in fact when I start plan 9 I get a stripe with "winwatch
> -e winwatch" in it and 3 sub-rio sessions that fill in the rest of the
> screen, but some of the offsets are currently hard-coded  and thusly
> not dynamic at all to other changes.
>
> It's nearly virtual desktop space.  (and winwatch only watches the rio
> sessions, not the windows within them, good old private namespaces win
> again for me here.)
>
> Within a rio session I find I often want to expand a window to fill
> the whole thing in as well.
>
> Rio provides a good bit of mechanism, just not a ton of policy...
> that's up to people to customize for themselves.  I once thought I had
> a way to improve rio, I was wrong and Russ pointed out a way to do the
> things I wanted to do with the filesystem.

(Re: tiling wm that the comment was to)
I heard this the last time I mentioned the issue, and I believe it may
be the key but it seems like a lot of things just have to be hardcoded
and juggled about with tools. Making it more of a tiling emulation on
top of a single-space floating window system instead of a system where
any and all windows are managed by a single entity (window manager or
replacing system) no matter what they are, where they came from
(size/pos arguments) and what they try to do.

--
The problem with explosives is that if you screw up, you're not just
history, but biology, geography and modern art as well.
	-- From the .sig of Chris Hacking

Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Harri Haataja]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 11:25:03PM +0200, Sascha Retzki wrote:
> > - Good tiling window management. I won't go back to handling any window
> >   borders with a mouse.
>
> Hm, I find that one a bit funny. I actually enjoy that - maybe I
> missed the latest news in the control-windows-with-vi-like-keys
> technologies(tm) (yeah I tried wmi once)?

> A full-screen button is the only thing that I miss sometimes. Pressing a key and acme is fullscreen ;)

So you don't really know and you tried one of the worse (despite the
9technology inside) ones. Like I said, I won't go back. A lot of others
I know won't either. It seems to have that effect.

The point is that the window manager will do the window management and I
simply don't.  There's nothing to do once it's running. Except select
the window you want, the workspace you want and pop-up/down any
temporary ones. I *never* in my life want to move or resize another
window. I hate it. I will never have a window (partially) obscured by
another one. I switch contexts with practically zero delay and I don't
need to look for the mouse, pointer or try to move anything out of the
way. Ever. I love that.

Full-screen for *any* frame and back again (except in wmii) is of course
included. As may be workspaces where frames are shuffled dynamically and
workspaces that fit legacy wimp apps by providing a space upon which
windows hover and can be arranged at will. By mouse.

> A mouse is a damn intuitiv interface as it behaves pretty much like a
> single finger. imho

All you can do is point and grunt (click). I'll take the expressive
command language instead. I don't want to communicate with a finger if I
can avoid it. Not even with a machine. But that's an old flame war.

> > - Threaded news & mail reader(s).
> Those always confused me - I hate it.

And in most places, you'd get the option of not selecting that or
turning it off. Just set sort by date instead of thread. Nice two keys
in mutt, I often eg sort spam folders by subject to get through piles of
identical ones quickly.

Oh, this spans another feature. Select by some criteria. I often have a
long line of mail and I want to read a single thread. So I can limit the
view to a certain subject for example. I won't drift off to another
thread and the broken followups (so common with 9fans) will not appear
who knows where, but all in one place.

But yes, choice. Maybe that is the only thing missing. I believe people
are different and hav different needs (even if they could some how be
re-educated to some superior ideal another human has cooked up).
Naturally there's good reason in keeping the kitchen sink out, but the
other extreme is as bad. There's also probably no universal agreement on
what balance point in between is best.

> > - Perhaps something like tor,
> I did not check, but I guess they just enculapse a e.g. TCP/IP-paket
> into $something? Sounds like a /net-like fs can do the trick then.

I also ignored the content of that sentence, so a stock reply:
Again, not for any other system than plan9.

> > a filtering proxy,
> What's that? Squid? What do you filter? What protocol? Pakets or
> content of pakets?

Mostly ads away from web pages, obnoxious javascript, information leaks
in browsers. Privoxy is often used together with tor
(http://tor.eff.org) so that just sort of came out. I can do without and
I'm sure that without a (mammoth) browser it's not much of an issue.

> Paket filtering is your last security wall - proper updates, an
> infrastructure with security in mind etc are the first things to be
> done. Furthermore, as you statted, Plan9 ain't really work as a
> 'router' (no NAT etc) in an environment where you need such thing.
> Anyway, I agree paket filtering would be usefull.

Naturally. This was one of the things that would allow it to be snuck
into servers. Routers and firewalls are often standalone. Having an
obscure small system as one is also a benefit.

> > Outside that, good terminal emulation with ssh would be one bridge
> > I'm not sure that is available.
>
> vt(1) works for me(tm). Okay, I just occassionally edit config files
> with vi and normally just use vt and ssh to shut machines down ;)

Once you get that far, it probably does. If you're hanging on to some
odd legacy programs, it might not. YMMV. Another sort of sneak-in
helping feature.


The first paragraph in my original was intended as a sort of disclaimer
or warning. I don't want to blame or change plan9 per se. I'm happy it
exists and don't mind if it keeps on existing where it is. But it would
be nice if it made it into more places in one form or another.

Personally I might or might not use it either way. I'll probably like it
for many things any way. And I don't imagine my needs or opinions have
any leverage. But if anyone happens to want to hear of a different look
at things (as mine probably is compared to many), I can probably provide
some of that.

So, these/those were just things that I think might make it easier for
plan9 to sneak into environments I've used. Sort of like samba, IP masq
and apache allowed Linux to sneak into windos shops (and pulled many
others along). Eventually all those things might be replaced by truly
better things as people learn and discover and no longer need to use bad
legacy stuff because everyone else does.

--
Revenge is an integral part of forgiving and forgetting.
		-- The BOFH

Re: Re: [9fans] missing applications

[andrey mirtchovski]

> The point is that the window manager will do the window management and I
> simply don't.  There's nothing to do once it's running. Except select
> the window you want, the workspace you want and pop-up/down any
> temporary ones. I *never* in my life want to move or resize another
> window. I hate it. I will never have a window (partially) obscured by
> another one. I switch contexts with practically zero delay and I don't
> need to look for the mouse, pointer or try to move anything out of the
> way. Ever. I love that.
>

perhaps running acme or sam instead of rio will solve your problems?
there everything is tiled away nicely :)

Re: Re: [9fans] missing applications

[Harri Haataja]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 12:33:55PM -0600, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
> >The point is that the window manager will do the window management
> >and I simply don't.  There's nothing to do once it's running. Except
> >select the window you want, the workspace you want and pop-up/down
> >any temporary ones. I *never* in my life want to move or resize
> >another window. I hate it. I will never have a window (partially)
> >obscured by another one. I switch contexts with practically zero
> >delay and I don't need to look for the mouse, pointer or try to move
> >anything out of the way. Ever. I love that.
>
> perhaps running acme or sam instead of rio will solve your problems?
> there everything is tiled away nicely :)

Indeed. Acme also has nice tiling wm emulation ;)
Maybe people just don't keep that many windows open or they have honking
big screens that can hold all the things in view at once. That would
explain the feature popping up in a place where contexts pile up quickly
like in an editor. Of course it's much more. And kind of MDI. More old
conflicts lie that way.

--
And before anyone complains about the grammar, I'm so jetlagged that my
hands aren't even in the same time zone...
		-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett (pqf)

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Micah Stetson]

> I make frequent use of the evil spreadsheet at work. We do a lot of
> data collection, so we need something of that sort. It's probably
> missing because implementing an Excel-alike is "boring" and somehow
> against "the Plan 9 way".

I've often thought that something like acme for tabular data would be
cool.  I'd basically like a row/column-based editor for tab-delimited
text files plus a filesystem interface.  I imagine a shell script or
two, with something like that, would be more powerful than most
spreadsheets.  You could also use it to browse/edit databases.  I
don't think that would be boring or against the Plan 9 way.

No code forthcoming.  This message is not intended to be helpful.

Micah

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Jack Johnson]

On 7/24/06, Micah Stetson <micah@stetsonnet.org> wrote:
> > missing because implementing an Excel-alike is "boring" and somehow
> > against "the Plan 9 way".
>
> text files plus a filesystem interface.  I imagine a shell script or
> two, with something like that, would be more powerful than most
> spreadsheets.

I was skimming an article on the new Windows shell:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars/

It supports some interesting things with CSV and XML as data and a
SQL-like syntax to manipulate it.  The meat of it is at:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/other/msh.ars/7

All things you can do with other tools, but they make it darned easy,
and standardizing the access to the data is the leverage (something
Plan 9 is also good at).

-Jack

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Ronald G Minnich]

csant wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich
> <rminnich@lanl.gov>  wrote:
>
>> Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have
>> two  spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or
>> macos  system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not,
>> sufficiently  capable to be the only system one uses.
>
>
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there
> anything  else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps":
> what exactly  is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?
>
> /c

browser of course.

But ... you can't run linux-based ECAD software. That affects me.

All 3rd party compilers -- no good.

no virtual machine software.

Those are the four things that hit me.

ron

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Ronald G Minnich]

csant wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich
> <rminnich@lanl.gov>  wrote:
>
>> Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have
>> two  spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or
>> macos  system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not,
>> sufficiently  capable to be the only system one uses.
>
>
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there
> anything  else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps":
> what exactly  is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?
>
> /c

oh, and the biggie,

gcc

ron

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[csant]

> oh, and the biggie,
>
> gcc

I thought there was a port? I haven't got around to triying it yet, but is
there somethig wrong with it?
/c

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, csant <csant@csant.info> wrote:
> > oh, and the biggie,
> >
> > gcc
>
> I thought there was a port? I haven't got around to triying it yet, but is
> there somethig wrong with it?
> /c
>

I think I even have gcc3 in my dump somewhere... IIRC it was functional.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Ronald G Minnich]

csant wrote:
>> oh, and the biggie,
>>
>> gcc
>
>
> I thought there was a port? I haven't got around to triying it yet, but
> is  there somethig wrong with it?
> /c

for it to really be a "port", it has to be pushed back to the
mainstream. Otherwise, it's more of an anomoly than a port.

ron

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
> csant wrote:
> >> oh, and the biggie,
> >>
> >> gcc
> >
> >
> > I thought there was a port? I haven't got around to triying it yet, but
> > is  there somethig wrong with it?
> > /c
>
> for it to really be a "port", it has to be pushed back to the
> mainstream. Otherwise, it's more of an anomoly than a port.
>
> ron
>

Based on what I know of Gentoo and FreeBSD ports, often things are
*never* pushed upstream.  What you end up with is a bunch of, often
dead-end, forks.

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, csant <csant@csant.info> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
> wrote:
>
> > Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
> > spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
> > system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
> > capable to be the only system one uses.
>
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
> else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps": what exactly
> is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?
>

Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
program, probably wouldn't be able to handle the amount of email I get
or let me organize it the way I can with my Mac and Mail.app or even
"mutt".

Most of my work is done on remote machines, so having "vt" and "ssh"
are a big deal. "sshnet" is awesome for what I do in conjunction with
u9fs and npfs.

But then there are those users who'll be put off because Plan 9 isn't
"shiny" enough.  I suppose if it works for fish lures, it works for
people too.

Dave

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[John Floren]

On 7/24/06, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
> program, probably wouldn't be able to handle the amount of email I get
> or let me organize it the way I can with my Mac and Mail.app or even
> "mutt".
>
> Most of my work is done on remote machines, so having "vt" and "ssh"
> are a big deal. "sshnet" is awesome for what I do in conjunction with
> u9fs and npfs.
>
> But then there are those users who'll be put off because Plan 9 isn't
> "shiny" enough.  I suppose if it works for fish lures, it works for
> people too.
>
> Dave
>
Oh, I think Plan 9 is nice looking. As has been mentioned elsewhere,
the colors are particularly good. Maybe Plan 9 is too pretty :-) I
personally sometimes like the unfriendly demand of a UNIX console
login screen or an xdm-style login window... throw me to the wolves, I
know.


John
--
TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Sascha Retzki]

> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
> program, probably wouldn't be able to handle the amount of email I get
> or let me organize it the way I can with my Mac and Mail.app or even
> "mutt".

I just have 9fans and some private email on my gmx-account (which I use with acme Mail and upas/fs) - I must say that rocks. I don't know what you mean by 'organizing', tho - several mailinglists? html-mail users?

Just want to know.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[andrey mirtchovski]

i have pipeto and pipefrom organize my mail in mailboxes -- the
incoming ones in a daily archive and/or copied to particular groups,
the outgoing ones in a daily archive. in fact this is more powerful
than my other mailer (OSX's) which, as far as i can see, can not
create folders "on demand" in which to store its mail. pipefrom/
pipeto are just as powerful as any procmail script out there, if not
more.

i've been using the same config for more than 3 years now without any
significant changes except to add the occasional mailing list to the
archive.

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, andrey mirtchovski <andrey@lanl.gov> wrote:
> i have pipeto and pipefrom organize my mail in mailboxes -- the
> incoming ones in a daily archive and/or copied to particular groups,
> the outgoing ones in a daily archive. in fact this is more powerful
> than my other mailer (OSX's) which, as far as i can see, can not
> create folders "on demand" in which to store its mail. pipefrom/
> pipeto are just as powerful as any procmail script out there, if not
> more.
>

Sounds pretty cool.  I need to learn how to do that.  I'm
experimenting with my ISP provided email lately, having trouble with
the SMTP setup but the incoming upas/fs pop stuff is working
splendidly.

The TLS configuration was a snap, once I read our wiki on it.  I'm
just not sure what I'm missing.... could be a flag in remotemail.  Got
some message at one point about aliasmail.

I'll have to wait until I'm done with my regular work for today before
I can get back to debugging that though.

Dave

Re: Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, Sascha Retzki <sretzki@gmx.de> wrote:
> > Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
> > program, probably wouldn't be able to handle the amount of email I get
> > or let me organize it the way I can with my Mac and Mail.app or even
> > "mutt".
>
> I just have 9fans and some private email on my gmx-account (which I use with acme Mail and upas/fs) - I must say that rocks. I don't know what you mean by 'organizing', tho - several mailinglists? html-mail users?
>
> Just want to know.
>

My mail gets sorted into many different mail boxes, I keep an archive
mail box of the previous months's mail and then pack up the whole last
year into separate IMAP accessed folders.  Being able to search mail
bodies is great, I think the upas/fs filesystem might actually handle
that better than "Spotlight" and be at least as good as mutt for that.

My current inbox has over 1000 emails, and that's just this past
month... I don't actually ever delete any of it.  You might ask why,
but it's because I'm the only one who can seem to find "that document
I sent you a few months back" etc.

And yes, sadly, I get a LOT of HTML email.  That's probably the #1
pain in the ass where I work.

Being able to integrate with some kind of address book in Acme Mail
would be another good step towards integrating my email flow.

I also have calendaring apps tied into my email and everyone uses
those iCal/Outlook compatible attachments to schedule meetings, which
even on my mac I often have to open in Emacs or TextEdit to figure out
when the meeting is set.  (depending on how they address the
email/invitation).

Dave

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Skip Tavakkolian]

i tend to keep my mail box pruned, but still keep nearly ½ of all the
messages; i archive once every 6 months or so.  mailbox gets big, but
i've not had any problems.  e.g:

cpu% grep 'Well as much as I love how upas' /mail/fs/mbox/*/body
/mail/fs/mbox/2634/body:Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
/mail/fs/mbox/2638/body:> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
/mail/fs/mbox/2640/body:> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail

have you found a upas limit?

>> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
>> program, probably wouldn't be able to handle the amount of email I get
>> or let me organize it the way I can with my Mac and Mail.app or even
>> "mutt".
> 
> I just have 9fans and some private email on my gmx-account (which I use with acme Mail and upas/fs) - I must say that rocks. I don't know what you mean by 'organizing', tho - several mailinglists? html-mail users? 

Re: Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/24/06, Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com> wrote:
> i tend to keep my mail box pruned, but still keep nearly ½ of all the
> messages; i archive once every 6 months or so.  mailbox gets big, but
> i've not had any problems.  e.g:
>
> cpu% grep 'Well as much as I love how upas' /mail/fs/mbox/*/body
> /mail/fs/mbox/2634/body:Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
> /mail/fs/mbox/2638/body:> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
> /mail/fs/mbox/2640/body:> Well as much as I love how upas/fs works, it, along with Acme's Mail
>
> have you found a upas limit?
>

I've not... I was just expressing my skepticism of it's ability to
scale.  Perhaps it's not as bad as I thought.

As in my saying "as much as I love how upas/fs works" I was actually
thinking that having mail as a filesystem was clearly a big bonus, for
tools like grep/sed/awk to be applied to.

Dave

Re: Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[rog]

> > have you found a upas limit?
> >
>
> I've not... I was just expressing my skepticism of it's ability to
> scale.  Perhaps it's not as bad as I thought.

well, it scales a certain amount but not indefinitely. i've been putting off pruning my mailbox
for a little while and it's currently got over 3000 messages (about 27MB), which makes for a upas/fs
taking about 57MB. that's not great.

some time ago i dived into making it index-based, but as with most of my little side projects
i got too ambitious and it never got completed. my aim was to enable tagging of mail messages
and quick keyword searching. selection was to have been done by cloning a mailbox directory
and writing a filter string to a ctl file, resulting in a directory with only the selected messages.

i'd like to get rid of the need to delete or archive any messages at all. the tagging should
get rid of the need to guess which messages are new or unread (or unreplied to, or whatever).

[for the record, the bit i stumbled over was the underlying tag/keyword store. so many
trade-offs in b-tree algorithms, and was that really what i wanted anyway?]

Re: Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Darren Bane]

On 25/07/06, rog@vitanuova.com <rog@vitanuova.com> wrote:

!snip!

> [for the record, the bit i stumbled over was the underlying tag/keyword store. so many
> trade-offs in b-tree algorithms, and was that really what i wanted anyway?]

This just reminded me of one of Caerwyn's Inferno projects:

  http://www.caerwyn.com/ipn/2005/07/lab-34-lexis-semantic-binary-model.html

He'd be better able to say, but it should be possible to construct a
namespace so it can search upas/fs mailboxes too.  Presuming that
using Inferno programs isn't a problem ...
--
Darren Bane

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Sascha Retzki]

> On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:28:58 +0200, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
> wrote:
>
>> Another thing I ought to mention here. A LOT of the Plan 9 guys have two
>> spouses: their plan 9 machine and their windows or linux or macos
>> system. That tells me that Plan 9 has not been, and is not, sufficiently
>> capable to be the only system one uses.
>
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
> else that really is missing?
>
> /c

There are several things. 'Multimedia' beeing one. I am not talking about mplayer here, but rather that you for example cannot or can hardly play mp3 and ogg (vorbis, flac) files on Plan9. There are APE ports for ogg123/mpg123 iirc (when I saw them first, they were not on sources.. maybe that has not even changed yet). but those do not fork() and don't present the user with some way of e.g. fast forward etc.

Videos are the other part of that story. fgb as some mpeg2-decoder iirc - don't know if that one works.

> You mention "third party apps": what exactly
> is missing?

Powerpoint, flash, all those 'multimedia' things - oh please. If anybody feels like he wants to write converters for those: thumbs up. I am not that one. I don't even want them even if we can 'decode' them.


But, as I am interested in all different things wrt audio, I am interested in improving the situation from note#1.. anyway. No results yet.

As I have not yet found a cool way to forward tcp/ip traffic from non-plan9-systems in my LAN to the internets, I have a a netbsd-system doing NAT. Bah. Got to ssh root@routi.local.net every evening to switch it off :( I hate that. Okay I also hate NAT.. no idea howto really fix that. I thought about ip/ppp{oe,} once... hm

As I sometimes need/want a browser which parses >~ 98% webpages, maybe some windows-tools if I need to work from my home, and as I occassionally play some 3d-games, I got a windows-box. I don't really expect those things on Plan9, tho I would love to see them :)


> And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?

The reasons are thus obviously:
1.) properitary systems. Bummer
2.) more time for things to grow - more developers doing things in userspace. Slashdot/osnews.com may or may not fix that. I don't care as I will try to do my best anyway. Bummer? More marketing? Marketing at the right places (universities?)! No idea how that could be done and who could do that best. Bummer
3.) ethical reasons - we have no idea howto fix them but we all know the current solutions in 'IT' are wrong. Bummer

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Richard Miller]

> Okay I also hate NAT.. no idea howto really fix that.

ipv6?

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[erik quanstrom]

abaco is getting there.  i'm sure fgb would appreciate some help.

- erik

>As I sometimes need/want a browser which parses >~ 98% webpages [...]

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 09:49:58PM +0200, csant wrote:
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
> else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps": what exactly
> is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?

It's no one thing that *you* can't live without, but rather that you cut
yourself off from the rest of the world when you run Plan 9 as your only
system.  Yes, the back of a browser can be a real bummer (I tried to live
with Charon as my only browser for a while; that didn't work out too well).
Any number of things may or may not be necessary on a daily basis:

0) A browser.
1) Some office suite application or applications.  Sure, *I* can edit
   my documents in sam or acme and do markup using troff or tex or
   some other such thing, but you ever try emailing a troff document
   to a non-technical colleague?  Or one who comes from a Windows only
   background?  These are the same people who may email me an MS word
   document with embedded graphics, or a PowerPoint presentation, or
   an Excel spreadsheet.  Or a Visio graphic.
   You get the picture; I can control the format of the output I
   produce output, and thus can get away with using Plan 9.  But I
   can't control others, who may send me something I need to see, read,
   watch or listen to, but can't do so under Plan 9.
2) An IM client (I worked at a job where we used AIM for internal company
   communications; actually, two of my jobs used it.  Believe it or not,
   it was highly effective.  Sure, the protocol sucks, but we could "talk"
   to one another on a daily basis).
3) I use Mathematica a lot.  That's critical for me.
4) I hate to say it, but sometimes I need C++, or Objective-C, or any
   number of other languages that I just don't have either compilers or
   interpreters for under Plan 9.
5) Any number of players of various multimedia formats.
6) A mail client that can do GnuPG or OpenPGP or whatever.
7) Any number of other applications....

Some of the traditional solutions are bandaids; VNC is a good example here.
It prevents gangrene, but isn't a real solution by itself; for instance, it
*may* be fast enough to push video over my network (or, rather, my network
may be fast enough for VNC to keep up with real-time video), but what about
sound?  Ugh.  It's like X11 all over again...a partial solution to a sticky
problem at the wrong level.

Other solutions, the so-called, "well, quit bitching and write the code..."
models also break down.  I'm sorry, but Mozilla has 10,000 sets of hands
writing code for firefox; I can't duplicate all that effort.  And from a
usage point of view, they've done a lot and done a reasonable job at it,
too.  I'd rather leverage their work than reinvent the square wheel myself.
So, I come up with some hybrid solution where I have multiple platforms.
For me, it works to have a combination of Plan 9 (even if my servers are
currently down, and have been for a while now...hi Andrey!  Sorry about
that!), Unix, VMS, and the mac.  Others wouldn't like that.  Hey, that's
cool, this is what I like and feel I'm effective in.

Anyway, that's my 2c.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[John Floren]

On 7/24/06, Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu> wrote:
<snip>
> 0) A browser.
> 1) Some office suite application or applications.  Sure, *I* can edit
>   my documents in sam or acme and do markup using troff or tex or
>   some other such thing, but you ever try emailing a troff document
>   to a non-technical colleague?  Or one who comes from a Windows only
>   background?  These are the same people who may email me an MS word
>   document with embedded graphics, or a PowerPoint presentation, or
>   an Excel spreadsheet.  Or a Visio graphic.
>   You get the picture; I can control the format of the output I
>   produce output, and thus can get away with using Plan 9.  But I
>   can't control others, who may send me something I need to see, read,
>   watch or listen to, but can't do so under Plan 9.
> 2) An IM client (I worked at a job where we used AIM for internal company
>   communications; actually, two of my jobs used it.  Believe it or not,
>   it was highly effective.  Sure, the protocol sucks, but we could "talk"
>   to one another on a daily basis).
> 3) I use Mathematica a lot.  That's critical for me.
> 4) I hate to say it, but sometimes I need C++, or Objective-C, or any
>   number of other languages that I just don't have either compilers or
>   interpreters for under Plan 9.
> 5) Any number of players of various multimedia formats.
> 6) A mail client that can do GnuPG or OpenPGP or whatever.
> 7) Any number of other applications....
<snip>
This appears to be quite a complete list. I second everything on the
list, with the inclusion of some other apps (circuit design stuff). IM
is important, because it's the best way to reach my friends. Media
players--huge. I love my media. On the same note, some decent
filesharing interfaces would be good, like Direct Connect. Wonder how
that could be implemented the Plan 9 Way? Allow searching by grepping
a file, and have all the clients mapped in a directory tree? Hmm.
Although I like the acme mail client and even find 'mail' useful, I
could really do with something beefier before making the switch--I'm
gonna do the bad thing and utter the words "Thunderbird-like"
Well, there's MY 2 cents, take it or leave it.

John
--
TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Federico G. Benavento]

> 2) An IM client (I worked at a job where we used AIM for internal company
>    communications; actually, two of my jobs used it.  Believe it or not,
>    it was highly effective.  Sure, the protocol sucks, but we could "talk"
>    to one another on a daily basis).

http://bsflite.sourceforge.net IM client that runs on Plan 9

there is also a jabber client in Christoph's contrib dir, with jabber you get
msn, icq and others, ah and there is also im.bitlbee.org

Federico G. Benavento

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 799 bytes --]

On 7/24/06, Federico G. Benavento <benavento@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 2) An IM client (I worked at a job where we used AIM for internal
> company
> >    communications; actually, two of my jobs used it.  Believe it or not,
> >    it was highly effective.  Sure, the protocol sucks, but we could
> "talk"
> >    to one another on a daily basis).
>
> http://bsflite.sourceforge.net IM client that runs on Plan 9



Yeah, bsflite might be the most portable IM client in the known universe...
It's pretty danged cool, seems to build on every platform under the sun.

I think bsflite has a mordor account too.

there is also a jabber client in Christoph's contrib dir, with jabber you
> get
> msn, icq and others, ah and there is also im.bitlbee.org
>
> Federico G. Benavento
>
>

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Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Bakul Shah]

This thread has me wondering....  Could it be that Plan 9's
"everything is a file" model works extremely well in a narrow
band of designs but does not offer much of an advantage for
larger scale designs?  May be one needs so many other things
that the advantage offered by plan 9 gets lost in the noise.

Or is it that no one has pushed use of this model hard enough
for things like browsers, compilers and such?  And may be
what is needed are Plan 9 analogues of books like The Unix
Programming Environment, The Unix Network Programming, The
Haskell School of Expression, Design Patterns, Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs and so on?

Or may be its way is most suited for some future where
computers as public transport for a variety of unrelated
programs are a thing of the past?

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[John Pritchard]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3843 bytes --]


Bakul Shah wrote:
> This thread has me wondering....  Could it be that Plan 9's
> "everything is a file" model works extremely well in a narrow
> band of designs but does not offer much of an advantage for
> larger scale designs?  May be one needs so many other things
> that the advantage offered by plan 9 gets lost in the noise.
>
> Or is it that no one has pushed use of this model hard enough
> for things like browsers, compilers and such?  And may be
> what is needed are Plan 9 analogues of books like The Unix
> Programming Environment, The Unix Network Programming, The
> Haskell School of Expression, Design Patterns, Structure and
> Interpretation of Computer Programs and so on?
>
> Or may be its way is most suited for some future where
> computers as public transport for a variety of unrelated
> programs are a thing of the past?
>
>
>

Hi,

Can't resist to write on this subject...

Consider this...

With Unix the OS was created in a much less complex world where time and
space were orders of magnitude less expansive.  As the computing world
evolved through the 80's and 90's this OS (Unix, the founding world view
for many of us) came to need "application layer" software (libs,
interpreters, etc) to bring high level symbolic primitives to
application development.  An interesting example may be the Java VM in
that a fat layer like that would have been entirely unfathomable in 1970
and even in 1980 (Objects seem to be an appendage to the Oak instruction
set), but today this level of abstraction from the system is good for a
lot of application development (performance aside).

Inferno's Dis (Limbo) is on the same level of abstraction (but different
of course), while Plan9's Alef is another approach.

The Plan9 and Inferno OSes have sought to provide clear application
platforms in terms of system model and development language for this
networked world.  But it's easy to go too far in pushing the system
model on applications.  These modern OSes don't have the need for
application layers like Unix/C did, but developing in oneself the
experience of interesting application architectures over these system
architectures has to begin somewhere -- and so it begins with our
current concepts.

Ideally one gets to specialize in an application domain where the
interesting problems in an application domain are studied and become
known.  Then finding intersections between system architectures and
application architectures for more compelling applications is the art
one may spend decades developing.

If we were to formulate mozilla for an OS like Plan9 or Inferno, what
would be different in that software architecture?  One can either
descend into the endless void of great possibilities, or truncate that
space at a first stage (it's just an HTTP client) and then  start over
from scratch for a second (it's a world of multi-protocol clients).
Maintain sanity.

It's not for nothing that the world of software has gone through many
object and networked object models in the past two or three decades ---
one perspective.  Or if we go back to John Holland's Universal Spaces
(1960's, partially available in Arthur Burk's "Essays") we can see this
history from another perspective in which models are differentiated into
universal and specific (very interesting).

When is a universal model what an application wants, and when is it a
specific one.  Perhaps this question is interesting when it helps to
define "stage one" and "stage two" in our broad prototyping cycles.
Because models tend toward the universal in the scope of any one
(networked, multi) application, but are always compromised.  The term
Data Structures can evoke the opposing or bottom- up view of specific
models.

..book truncated here..


cheers

/j



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Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[erik quanstrom]

i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.

if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
"web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.

(giving acme the ability to display images inline with text would make
replacing rio with acme more palatable.)

- erik

On Tue Jul 25 05:36:25 CDT 2006, jdp@syntelos.com wrote:
> If we were to formulate mozilla for an OS like Plan9 or Inferno, what
> would be different in that software architecture?  One can either
> descend into the endless void of great possibilities, or truncate that
> space at a first stage (it's just an HTTP client) and then  start over
> from scratch for a second (it's a world of multi-protocol clients).
> Maintain sanity.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

Just curious. Anyone besides us at urjc tried omero?
It has images, as well as bugs :-)


On 7/25/06, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
>
> if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
> "web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.
>
> (giving acme the ability to display images inline with text would make
> replacing rio with acme more palatable.)
>
> - erik
>
> On Tue Jul 25 05:36:25 CDT 2006, jdp@syntelos.com wrote:
> > If we were to formulate mozilla for an OS like Plan9 or Inferno, what
> > would be different in that software architecture?  One can either
> > descend into the endless void of great possibilities, or truncate that
> > space at a first stage (it's just an HTTP client) and then  start over
> > from scratch for a second (it's a world of multi-protocol clients).
> > Maintain sanity.
>
>

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Paul Hebble]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 11:23:32PM +0200, Francisco J Ballesteros wrote:
> Just curious. Anyone besides us at urjc tried omero?
> It has images, as well as bugs :-)

I tried to try omero, but it just crashed.  Then again, I have zero
confidence that I properly followed the installation instructions to
"unpack on top of a Plan 9 installation", since tar gave me some
permissions errors.  Are there more verbose instructions somewhere?

--
	Paul

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

I don´t think there more verbose install instructions, sorry. Just the manual
pages. Anyway, if anyone has problems but still wants to try,
drop us a line to lsub@lsub.org
and we´ll try to help, to avoid
adding noise to this list. Perhaps omero was using some
font or directory that is not std in Plan 9, but it should have called
sysfatal()
in that case. We´ll have to double check.
We plan to make a new update sometime after summer, anyway.

On 7/25/06, Paul Hebble <maceo@imsa.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 11:23:32PM +0200, Francisco J Ballesteros wrote:
> > Just curious. Anyone besides us at urjc tried omero?
> > It has images, as well as bugs :-)
>
> I tried to try omero, but it just crashed.  Then again, I have zero
> confidence that I properly followed the installation instructions to
> "unpack on top of a Plan 9 installation", since tar gave me some
> permissions errors.  Are there more verbose instructions somewhere?
>
> --
>         Paul
>
>

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[David Leimbach]

On 7/25/06, Francisco J Ballesteros <nemo@lsub.org> wrote:
> Just curious. Anyone besides us at urjc tried omero?
> It has images, as well as bugs :-)

It has been a long time since I tried omero... I want to again, soon.

Mainly I think I remember a feature that once I got my windows laid
out the way I wanted to I could essentially "tar" them up then untar
again to restore the layout.

Is this correct?

Like i said, It's been a while :-)

Dave
>
>
> On 7/25/06, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> > i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
> >
> > if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
> > "web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.
> >
> > (giving acme the ability to display images inline with text would make
> > replacing rio with acme more palatable.)
> >
> > - erik
> >
> > On Tue Jul 25 05:36:25 CDT 2006, jdp@syntelos.com wrote:
> > > If we were to formulate mozilla for an OS like Plan9 or Inferno, what
> > > would be different in that software architecture?  One can either
> > > descend into the endless void of great possibilities, or truncate that
> > > space at a first stage (it's just an HTTP client) and then  start over
> > > from scratch for a second (it's a world of multi-protocol clients).
> > > Maintain sanity.
> >
> >
>

Re: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Francisco J Ballesteros]

> Mainly I think I remember a feature that once I got my windows laid
> out the way I wanted to I could essentially "tar" them up then untar
> again to restore the layout.
>
> Is this correct?

Yes, as long as the apps are running, you can use tar to reanimate their
interfaces at any omero.

Now that we cleaned up our distrib, I went into spliting omero in two parts,
one viewer and the actual UI server. I completed the viewer, but still need
more time to complete the server, and a viewer in Limbo is also pending.
The new omero is going to include
an attribute in its panels to allow you to restart the application just by
extracting the UI, along the lines of Acme´s Dump/Load.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[erik quanstrom]

i might be suffering from nih syndrome.  i will take some time to check
it out.

- erik

On Tue Jul 25 16:24:11 CDT 2006, nemo@lsub.org wrote:
> Just curious. Anyone besides us at urjc tried omero?
> It has images, as well as bugs :-)
>
>
> On 7/25/06, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> > i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
> >
> > if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
> > "web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.
> >
> > (giving acme the ability to display images inline with text would make
> > replacing rio with acme more palatable.)
> >
> > - erik
> >
> > On Tue Jul 25 05:36:25 CDT 2006, jdp@syntelos.com wrote:
> > > If we were to formulate mozilla for an OS like Plan9 or Inferno, what
> > > would be different in that software architecture?  One can either
> > > descend into the endless void of great possibilities, or truncate that
> > > space at a first stage (it's just an HTTP client) and then  start over
> > > from scratch for a second (it's a world of multi-protocol clients).
> > > Maintain sanity.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[csant]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 22:17:01 +0200, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
wrote:

> i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
>
> if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
> "web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.

Well, isn't that kind of the way Abaco is going? Acme-like UI + a
rendering engine. Using Acme's MDI was an extremely happy choice for a
browser.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[erik quanstrom]

the short answer is no.

abaco does look and feel like acme, but it is a seperate program that
must manage windows and subprocs (like win).  what would be idea is to
have a small program like win that reads pages from webfs. it should be
possible to do without reimplementing any of that stuff.

the interesting part of how to do this i conviently swept under the rug.
maybe /mnt/acme/$winid/layout.

btw, abaco's design is very good.  it does a really nice job of getting to the
point without reams of code.

- erik

On Tue Jul 25 17:59:42 CDT 2006, csant@csant.info wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 22:17:01 +0200, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
> wrote:
>
> > i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
> >
> > if acme could handle a box-based layout with images and text, the
> > "web browser" could consist of webfs, http/layout and http/acmectl.
>
> Well, isn't that kind of the way Abaco is going? Acme-like UI + a
> rendering engine. Using Acme's MDI was an extremely happy choice for a
> browser.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Sascha Retzki]

>>
>> > i think the ideal "browser" for plan 9 would be acme.
>> >

I smell a 'graphical acme'-discussion. Not that I want you to stop, no, rather the other way round ;-)


I did not yet saw a programme which let's you manipulate pictures, btw. Oh, and I always wanted to write a dae for plan9 (digital audio editor).


Some GUIs I can come up with in my mind let the user select regions in the presented graph/picture - such a mechanism is needed, imho.

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Lou Kamenov]

On 7/26/06, Sascha Retzki <sretzki@gmx.de> wrote:
[..]
> I smell a 'graphical acme'-discussion. Not that I want you to stop, no, rather the > other way round ;-)

what i'd love to have is an acme debugger,  but cant recall where i
saw the screenshot.

cheers,
l

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Sascha Retzki]

> On 7/26/06, Sascha Retzki <sretzki@gmx.de> wrote:
> [..]
>> I smell a 'graphical acme'-discussion. Not that I want you to stop, no, rather the > other way round ;-)
>
> what i'd love to have is an acme debugger,  but cant recall where i
> saw the screenshot.
>
> cheers,
> l

You mean an 'Acid', but one that does more than Acid? Oh cool, mail it to the list in case you find it :)

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Lou Kamenov]

On 7/26/06, Lou Kamenov <loukamenov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/26/06, Sascha Retzki <sretzki@gmx.de> wrote:
> [..]
> > I smell a 'graphical acme'-discussion. Not that I want you to stop, no, rather the > other way round ;-)
>
> what i'd love to have is an acme debugger,  but cant recall where i
> saw the screenshot.

just to clarify, i saw a screenshot of something that looked like acme with a
debugger in it, used in inferno.

l

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Skip Tavakkolian]

>> what i'd love to have is an acme debugger,  but cant recall where i
>> saw the screenshot.
>
> just to clarify, i saw a screenshot of something that looked like acme with a
> debugger in it, used in inferno.

do you recall if the 'kill current process' icon was a little too graphic?

Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Lou Kamenov]

On 7/26/06, Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com> wrote:
[..]
> do you recall if the 'kill current process' icon was a little too graphic?

no, i cant really remember.

[9fans] small devices

[Charles Forsyth]

this talk of embedded devices reminds me that
we've got a kencc compiler and a little library for the atmel avr series.
if anyone is interested, let me know, and i'll bundle it up.
hint: it's called za/zc/zl because it's the last architecture you'd choose to use;
but berkeley popularised it, so what do i know?

Re: [9fans] small devices

[lucio]

> if anyone is interested, let me know, and i'll bundle it up.

If it will work on my SDK-200, I'll buy it :-)

Funny architecture, maybe, but it rocks.  Have you been following the
AVR-GCC (here goes me swearing in public) mailing list?

Except, of course, AVR-GCC doesn't fit in a Plan 9 box :-(

++L

Re: [9fans] small devices

[Paul Lalonde]

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Hash: SHA1

Is there a port for these: http://gumstix.com/products.html?  Or one
that would be a good place to start?
I'd even be happy with an inferno port.

Paul

On 26-Jul-06, at 1:40 PM, Charles Forsyth wrote:

> this talk of embedded devices reminds me that
> we've got a kencc compiler and a little library for the atmel avr
> series.
> if anyone is interested, let me know, and i'll bundle it up.
> hint: it's called za/zc/zl because it's the last architecture you'd
> choose to use;
> but berkeley popularised it, so what do i know?
>

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Re: [9fans] small devices

[csant]

>> this talk of embedded devices reminds me that
>> we've got a kencc compiler and a little library for the atmel avr
>> series.
> Is there a port for these: http://gumstix.com/products.html ?
That would be awesome. In my spare moments I dream about a Plan 9 (or
Inferno) running on the NSLU2 Linksys... (but have no skills to even try a
port)

Re: [9fans] small devices

[Ronald G Minnich]

Charles Forsyth wrote:
> this talk of embedded devices reminds me that
> we've got a kencc compiler and a little library for the atmel avr series.
> if anyone is interested, let me know, and i'll bundle it up.
> hint: it's called za/zc/zl because it's the last architecture you'd choose to use;
> but berkeley popularised it, so what do i know?
>
can you put it on sources?

ron

Re: [9fans] small devices

[LiteStar numnums]

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yeah, that would be nice to have, especially in sources (where i can easily
access it nearly everywhere).

On 7/26/06, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> wrote:
>
> Charles Forsyth wrote:
> > this talk of embedded devices reminds me that
> > we've got a kencc compiler and a little library for the atmel avr
> series.
> > if anyone is interested, let me know, and i'll bundle it up.
> > hint: it's called za/zc/zl because it's the last architecture you'd
> choose to use;
> > but berkeley popularised it, so what do i know?
> >
> can you put it on sources?
>
> ron
>



--
Lead thou me on, O Zeus, and Destiny,
To that goal long ago to me assigned.
I'll follow and not falter; if my will
Prove weak and craven, still I'll follow on.
-- Epictetus

He who enters his wife's dressing room is a philosopher or a fool. -- Balzac

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Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Skip Tavakkolian]

> Or may be its way is most suited for some future where
> computers as public transport for a variety of unrelated
> programs are a thing of the past?

yes; but future is now.  how many digital gizmos does a person have?
mobile phone, ipod, digital camera, pots phone. throw in a pda,
a laptop and a desktop and there it is.

what's the killer app for plan9?  the vector is toward distributed
access to resources.  9grid is extending the sharing to process space.
we're betting on our shared name space system.  apps for collaboration
are another area of possibility; checkout VN's solutions based on
inferno.  plan9 doesn't need to be "in your face" to be useful.  the
way we're using plan9, it is transparent to the end user.

the amount of success is directly related to the amount of money
behind the os or platform. linux offered real savings on
acquisition and maintenance over windows; windows' success was in
providing a common platform for "productivity" applications, that had
positive returns on investment to the user and revenue to the app
developer - the largest being ms itself.

once a killer app is created that shows a clear advantage for using
plan9 over other os, it will be adopted.  availability of p9p means
that app developers can take advantage of the model, while still
satisfying any dictated requirements for a more known os; this is
likely to be the case early in the adoption curve, despite the fact
that plan9 is much easier to learn and maintain than other os