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

[forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk]

several people have commented on the reliability of the system.
it is wrong to conclude from installation problems (or even some
operational problems on the PC) that plan 9 is an `alpha' or
`early version' of something, and that it is unsurprising to have it
fail regularly.  once installed on (or adapted to) a particular hardware
configuration, most of the software that is running is software with
a good few years behind it.  the bulk of the code is portable code
that has run on many different platforms, not just the PC.
it certainly is not error free, but it is far better than `alpha' or `beta' quality.

of course, there are newer, more experimental parts, that
are less well tried, but as in the original Unix systems,
the documentation is forthright about potential problems and limitations.

as one example, see the health warnings in the documentation
for Mothra and the Panel library on which it is built.
nevertheless, i've been using the Panel library
in a program i'm building and i regret to say that the errors have
been in my code, not td's.  (it is a very nice package, by the way.)

in general, compared to most other systems i know, there is typically several orders of magnitude less
source code to do more work (and more interesting work at that),
and consequently there is less space for the bugs to hide.

you really do have to read the documentation, though.
if you approach the system with too many preconceptions about what
it `obviously' will do, it will trip you up.  in particular,
the PC is just a hardware platform on which Plan 9 runs.
it isn't the system's primary platform (it hasn't got one!).

Plan 9 has its own conventions that it adheres to on *all hardware
platforms*.  this is a strength, not a weakness.
as someone operating a plan 9 installation, i can tell you from
experience that it is a real joy to have something that is so
plug compatible in its interfaces and details of management
that i can once again regard sparcs, 680x0 boxes, PCs, etc. as
just a source of faster (or slower) computing power.