The future of Plan9?

[Digby Tarvin digbyt@acm.org]

>
>I want to address a couple supposC)d shortcomings raised
>by Digby.  He writes that it's main inconvenience is its
>inability to communicate with other operating systems
>effectively.  This is half correct.
>
>I have found that Plan 9 communicates particularly well
>...
>I've found that Plan 9 is the best operating system for
>accessing other systems.

Just to clarify, what I find difficult is running applications
on other operating systems from Plan9, not accessing the file
system. I agree that file sharing is done superbly
in Plan9, and I particularly like the way things like
ftp are integrated into the file system.

Of course there is no fundamental reason why Plan 9 can't
be made to provide better support for logging in to
non Plan9 hosts, so this is not a criticism of the operating
system. It is just an omission from the distribution which
I find limiting.

But as someone else pointed out, I think the developers were
trying to make a point by deliberately excluding cursor
addressing and X support, which in a research system I guess
they should be free to do..

>I also wouldn't mind seeing 9x revived.  I would do it
>myself except I don't use X at all anymore.
>I expect to be using X a lot in a couple of months, and
>I might get sufficiently annoyed to do it then.  
>
>Perhaps the best way to do 9x is to write one that runs
>under Inferno?  Just a thought.
>
Does anyone know what became of 9x? I had a look, but couldn't
find even a partially completed implementation to work on.

Has anyone compiled the latest X client libraries in
the APE environment? I suppose these would be a starting
point to a quick and nasty XTerm. I assume the server
would be a more formidable task, and that is really what
would be needed to solve the Plan-9 to Unix execution
requirement.

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~cthulhu/