porting linux programs and drivers to plan9

[Brandon Black photon@nol.net]

> 	anna
> 	a% cd /sys/src/brazil/pc
> 	a% mk clean
> 	rm -f *.[v486x] *.root.s cfs.h fs.h init.h conf.h *.out
> 	for(i in pc pccpu pcdinar pcdisk)
> 		rm -f $i.c [9bz]$i boot$i.*
> 	a% time mk 'CONF=pccpu'>/dev/null
> 	12.27u 9.93s 23.81r 	 mk CONF=pccpu
> 	a% 
> 
> Anna is a dual 200MHz Pentium Pro (ASUS P6NP5 motherboard with 256MB EDO)
> connected to the fileserver via 100Base-TX.
> 
> --jim
> 

I hate to bug about this, as it seems *@bell-labs.com are all very
reluctant to speak up about such things, but my desires and curiousities
just keep mounting over the months.....

Can anyone give an (un/semi/really)-official status of Brazil to the
public here?  I'd really like to know if there is any hope that Brazil
will see the light of day outside Lucent.  Could there ever be a Brazil CD
release like the Plan 9 one?  Could it ever be licensed out as a
commercial, real product?  Could the code end up licensed out to Sun or
some such company, to be released by that third party as a commercial
product?

I work every day as a unix admin for a large group of C/C++ software
developers on unix.  My headeaches include making things like source code
control/ revisions/ history-tracking, etc work for them.  They also
include making different teams of people have wholly seperate environments
(including differing versions of tools like tcl/tk) for their respective
projects, all on the same machine.

I've always been a unix fan, but making all that stuff work on unix is a
major hack.  It causes me endless headaches.  And hardly a week goes by
that I don't mention to someone, "It would be so much easier for us to do
(something) correctly and efficiently on Plan 9 than unix".

If plan 9/brazil was a commercial/debugged/workable (maybe even supported)
platform, I could see at least my office, and probably many others around
the country, giving it a trial as an alternative to our hacked-up
falling-apart *nix environments.

Brandon