[comp.os.linux.misc] Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[Steve_Kilbane steve@cegelecproj.co.uk]

forsyth writes:
> anyhow, i expect in consequence to see lots of articles about Plan 9 in
> the local computing press!

Possibly, which is a shame, because I get the impression that the Plan 9
release is an attempt to get back to the early days of UNIX, with all
that that entailed: You want a copy? Here's a dump of our system; it's
up to you to figure out how to get it going at your end.

Personally, I can't complain about how things are. Plan 9 is supposed
to be unsupported, but you can't deny that the plan9.att.com folks have
been helpful on this list.

There appear to be two basic mistakes, here:
	- the 4-disk installation seems to cope for most people, but in
	some cases, it's out of its depth, and causes damage. Personally,
	I was surprised that so much effort had been put into the PC
	installation arrangement in the first place. Perhaps the PC
	program should have asked for more confirmation?

	- people still aren't backing up their disks. I know it's not
	much comfort to say things like this when folks have just
	trashed months of work, but to be honest, this is often the
	only way that many people learn. In my case, I *removed* the
	disk from the machine; no way was I going to risk losing data,
	just because the software did something I didn't expect.

I'm probably not expressing my point too well here, but what the hell.
Think of Plan 9 as an Alpha, because that's near enough the case. Remember
early versions of, oh, Mosaic or Netscape? Crashes all over the place. Well,
this is a similar situation, except Plan 9 is an OS, and when an OS goes
down, well, you'd just better have done your backups.

If this sounds negative, sorry. It's not supposed to be. I just get a
bit annoyed when people start treating all software as the same.
Plan 9 != gcc != Microsoft Word, so don't expect them to have similar
attributes.

steve, somewhat incoherent