Set User (aka su)

[Vadim Antonov avg@postman.ncube.com]

>Sure, that doesn't work in a telnet window, but that's a minor point.

"It does not work" is the euphmeism for "it will be fixed by
commercial vendors, many times over, and all their fixes will
be incompatible".

>Putting cursor addressing in 8½ would make it too easy to fall back
>to the old style of interaction, obscuring the new ideas.

There is a large class of applications which do not need any fancy
graphical interfaces.  You insist on making them inherently more
complex by forcing implementors to do graphics, their own cooked
mode processing (i already found eight instances in Plan9, all of
them different!) and making interaction with other systems a lot
more inconvinient than it should be.

>All your carping is really about Plan 9's interface incompatibilities with
>Unix.  If it's that important to you to use Unix, go use it. 

Sorry, i *do* use Unix, and mostly because there is a lot of
things i can't do with Plan 9, because of stupid reasons.

>Plan 9 is
>a statement about its own environment, not about how to connect to
>Unix using telnet. 

Ah, ok, so implementing a teletype instead of a display is a
"statement".  May i politely inquire why didn't you decide to
get rid of command line interface completely?  It is so archaic.
Some people did that long time ago and already made millions.

>Putting the kind of support you want into Plan 9
>compromises the ideas in the system itself.  We oppose that.

As i said you either confine system to research lab and hobbyists
or make it able to live in the real world, where legacy systems
are not going to die any time soon.

>If you decide that things need to be compatible with all that's gone
>before, you end up on the road Unix is on. 

You missed the point of my philosophy completely.  The road the
Unix went is because things were lacking in the initial system,
not because of the inherently bad interface.

It was very easy to design a good generic terminal emulator
and put it into kernel, and get rid of termcap goo in applications
forever.  Instead, users and vendors in need of a quick fix expanded
it, so it became intractable.  The same is going to happen with
Plan 9, if it is going to be a successful system.  The lack
of interface in the system will simply proliferate ugly hacks.

If you have to duplicate functionality in a number of places it
is an indication of a design failure. 

>You'll get something like
>Spring or Mach, which are really just reengineerings of the Unix
>interface. 

Does not Plan 9 include APE?  To make a statement coherent
you should remove it, as it makes people to use their old
habits of fopening and printf-ing.  It even has stty and
pseudo-terminals.

Why does it have telnet and cu at all?  It connects people
to the systems with a completely different interface (horror!).
Sure, people who want to talk to Unix systems can use Unix.

Also, to make the statement pure the name of "ls" should be
changed, so users won't forget they're not on a Unix system.

I respect people who go on hunger strikes.  As long as they
don't sneak food in when nobody watches.

--vadim