plan 9 bof at usenix

[Gregg Siegfried grs@claircom.com]

Since I've not seen a summary, and it will be fairly short, I'll give
you the rundown. I'm doing this from memory, so I may be corrected.

The Mary K^H^H^H^H^H^HPlan 9 BOF was fairly short.  Rob Pike preannounced
that AT&T will be making Plan 9 available as an unsupported product in
March or so.  When I think unsupported product, I think about the old
toolchest stuff, but I get the idea that this may be slightly different.

The CDROM will have source and binary for 4 architectures:
Intel 386
SPARC
MIPS
680x0

The CD contains *all* source except:
cfront, ksh, and crypt.  The first two are AT&T products that sell for
substantially more than $500 and are peripheral to plan 9, and crypt has
export restrictions.  But as Rob put it "You can get DES anywhere".

4 floppies will also be enclosed that contain a runnable, binary system
for the Intel.  Images of these floppies may be available on the net
subsequent to the release.

The cost will be <$500

All the plan 9 favorites will be included, such as Alef, acid, and acme.

The system is a feature snapshot of about 12 months ago, but with fixes
and improvements.

New documentation will be released, and will be included on the CD as
well as the ftp site.  The format will be similar to other research
releases, with a programmers manual volume and a papers volume.

Finally, free space on the CD will be filled with music.

After this annoucement, most questions revolved around specific hardware
and whether support for it was included.  I won't go into that.
No discussion about technical features of plan 9 took place.  I assume
that this will change once the system is available.

Ordering will involve the normal 800 number/credit card number protocol.

If I missed anything, I'm sure it will be pointed out.  I don't know about
anyone else, but I was not expecting such an announcement, and I'm quite
excited about it, although the AT&T corporate raider department recently
schlurped up my company, so I could probably get it independently. :-(

Lastly, I should probably explain the "Mary K" stuff at that top:
New Orleans was host to 6000 Mary Kay saleswomen simultaneous to USENIX,
many in the same hotel.

I'm unsure which group was more puzzled by the other.


Gregg Siegfried
grs@claircom.com