From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 00:36:20 -0400
From: Vadim Antonov avg@postman.ncube.com
Subject: Set User (aka su)
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 198d9ef8-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950821043620.IuE9I3JqDmvZsXhOCzdnw4DWV24zHn16SbHQ54QXtlo@z>

>Vadim, it's not Unix.  It's not supposed to be.
>
>-rob

It is still not an excuse for not providing elementary
conviniences.  My next pet peeve is that telnet from Plan9
does not even support carriage returns (although Plan9 telnetd
does insert them).

The minimalism itself is ok.  Heck, i myself did research on
mimimalist systems (the first report in Russian on the regular
O.S. architecture was presented in 88).  My current home project
is called "Trivial Routing Architecture Proposal".  However, too
often what goes for minimalism is simply shifting complexity from
one place to another, or having a user to deal with inconvinient
interfaces (like, i can't really use Plan9 system as my workstation
exactly because i can't telnet from it and do anything useful
because it lacks emulation of a reasonably simple alphanumeric
terminal, including (horror!) direct positioning).

Ultimately, MS-DOS is "more minimal" than Plan9.  It also is
not supposed to be and is not Unix.  Therefore it must be better.
Beat it.

My opinios is that *human interface* must be minimalistic and
the rest of the system should be minimal as possible while
supporting the functionality.  Functionality comes first.
Any missing piece in the basic system spawns ugly (and different)
workarounds.  Unix is the best example of it, what was in the
v7 remained the "common denominator" and the basis for portability,
the missing pieces were added in a multitude of different and
often architecturally insane ways.

--vadim