porting linux programs and drivers to plan9

[Eric Dorman eld@jewel.ucsd.edu]

cannings@cpsc.ucalgary.ca on Thu Apr 17 14:44:34 1997 wrote:

> >  Personally I have no desire to see old warhorses like emacs
> > ("Bugs:  Yes" :) ), gmake, gcc or anything windowsish incorporated into
> > Plan9.  Writing new stuff that takes advantage of Plan9 seems more fun
> > than dragging old unix cruft into the system.  The filesystem stuff
> > would probably be useful and interesting to someone out there, however.
> 
> It's odd, I've always hated what I considered bloatware like borland c++
> or wordperfect for windows. I've never considered Xemacs to be
> monolithic until now! So what features and ideas would be born if we
> mated the philosophies of emacs and plan9? Sorry, I will not except
> "sam" as an answer! 

You write as though you do not allow that anyone would actually
want to use anything other than emacs.  This brings to mind a
quote:
 "I am white on the right side.  [puzzled looks] Lokai is black 
on the right side--all his kind are black on the right side."

8)

And I use 'vi' on unix too :)

[xx]
> Another
> question: since emacs is not part of plan9 are you implying that you
> would code a radiological imaging system is sam?

Sure.  I'd use sam or acme depending on what I was doing.  If I
were doing driver junk I tend to use sam with a multifile setup, since
crashing and burning is the usual deal with driver stuff and I found
I didn't often need the power of acme.  If I'm writing userland 
stuff, acme works fine.  Offhand I can't recall a situation where
the editor/environment got in the way of getting stuff done.
 
> For others who don't have endless computers kicking around, if the
> pcdist had a free pppclient, a large documentation library, and a
> commonly recognized editor (can we agree on microemacs?) plan 9 would
> not be as much of a shock to new users. When I loaded up plan9 for the
> first time, I could hardly get around. Soon after I printed 40 pages of
> docs which was helpful, but it would have been better to have it online.
> I could not access the net via ppp to get anymore information. If the
> pcdist had plentiful man pages and a pppclient it would have been alot
> easier to get your feet wet with plan9.

I would think that the first thing one would do is print out the FAQ,
at any rate.  It *is* a hacker system anyway :)

> >  I wonder how the license agreement works in that case; I haven't read
> > it with an eye towards that particular arrangement.
> My interpretation of the license says that as long as I'm a "member" of
> an organization, meaning that I'm working towards the goals of that
> organization no matter my political or geographical position, I am
> included in the license agreement.

  I am, unfortunately, not in a position to make any judgements about
the terms of the license ageement, nor am I really in a position to 
negotiate with Bell Labs (Lucent?) to discover the agreements' limits.
Wasn't there some comments about the limits of the license in the 
mailing list archives?  I can't recall if it was relevant.

One thing you might consider is to get latched up with someone at
your uni doing active research in something interesting and computer-
related that may be applicable to Plan9, and see if they'll foot
the bill. 

Sometimes academic computing licensing people are accessible to
students, but if your uni is anything like UCSD, you'd have to crawl
past the sandbags, machinegun pits and minefields to get at them.  Our 
AC people act as if they were under siege.... i guess I can
see their point, however :)

> rich
> cannings@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Sincerely,

Eric Dorman
edorman@ucsd.edu