From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 00:59:02 -0400
From: Vadim Antonov avg@postman.ncube.com
Subject: [comp.os.linux.misc] Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 19954f54-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950821045902.Y-aLskl3n89FMSwejmU7rEQev79Bs9hgSj3lCMUtdWM@z>

>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.

Is it anything new?  My first large-scale project (i was in a kind
of leading position in the project, it had no formal "organization"
behind it for a long time) was building a family of Unix-like systems
(called DEMOS, addreviation for "Interactive Unified Portable Operating
System").  It was running on eight different architectures (including
clones of IBM/370 and some machines with no Western prototypes), and
was built from the same source tree (modulo hardware dependencies and
stuff like support for 3270s).  Needless to say all machines were
"the same".  It also was (and still is) the only effort in complete
internationalization of Unix.

I guess it is more like that Plan 9 has a single organization
producing releases.  If the system will be successful it is
inevitably going to change as i do not suppose that Bell Labs
people will be interested in supporting the commercial releases
(it is a hell lot of tedious work).

When it will happen the history with Unix will repeat itself,
as the root cause of the divergence of revisions wasn't fixed.
That root cause is the functional incompleteness.  Nobody in 
his own mind makes systems incompatible for the sheer hell of it.
Rather, people add things to fix their particular problems which
weren't adequately addressed in the original system.

The ideal system is "functionally complete" in regard to the
class of applications.  Then there wouldn't be ugly extensions
and creeping featurism.  Note that this approach is kind of
contradictory to the pure minimalism, which is to do absoulte
minimum to solve the problems at hand.

--vadim