Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)

[Quinn Dunkan <quinn@regurgitate.ugcs.caltech.edu>]

> is all I can contribute to Plan 9 myself.  It is my impression,
> and it must please be seen as such, that the Plan 9 developer are
> fearful that the GNU/Linux/*BSD etc. developer community will
> "taint" Plan 9 with their indiscriminate bloat.  Maybe such
> contamination is possible (I believe it is called miscegenation in

I think it's a much more practical matter.  gcc is not ported because no one
has ported it.  No one has ported it because no one has the time, which means
that no one wants it enough to set aside the time.  Hey, maybe dhog will
finish whatever he's doing with it, and then everyone who wants gcc can go get
it.

Sure, 9fans is often critical of things like gcc.  But if all it takes to
scare you out of porting something is a few disparaging comments from a
mailing list, you'd never have the stomach to do the port in the first place.

Plan9 was obviously designed, and designed by people who have clear and strong
ideas about what good design is.  But if you port or create something that
violates the design ideas of some other people, they're not going to come to
your house and shoot you.  Maybe someday someone will finish and release a gcc
port.  Then maybe someone will port mozilla.  I wouldn't expect those to go
into the standard distribution, but we do have a wiki, and it's dirt simple to
put up a page and a link.

Plan9 is also plenty free enough for me, and I suspect it is for most other
people as well (naturally you only hear from the vocal dissenters, though).
comp.os.plan9 has its share of silly time wasting arguments, but it would
hardly be Usenet without them.

> I don't expect the Plan 9 team to agree with me, we have a very
> different outlook at the "social" level, but perhaps there are
> others on this mailing list who feel that the "social experiment
> (Che Guevara)" is worth conducting even if the casualties could be
> numerous.

If you were waiting for *my* approval, go ahead and conduct it, whatever that
means.  Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't involve shooting people.

> Naturally, unlike Che Guevara, I don't propose to snatch the
> leadership position from the Plan 9 team, quite the contrary, I
> very much appreciate their continued contribution.  I would just
> appreciate it even more if they were encouraging rather than critical
> in those areas that apparently offend their sensibilities.

I think they're very encouraging.  When technical questions are raised, they
give helpful and clear answers, even when those questions are answered in the
documentation.  When "philosophical" questions are raised, they actually try
to understand what the question is (which is often most of the work, see the
"link" debate), and then give their honest opinions.  What more do you want, a
lollipop?  Since when does anyone need a unanimous vote of acceptance from
9fans to do anything?


On the subject of "what makes plan9 unique", for me, plan9 completely changed
my views on the mouse.  Forget the networking stuff, I just have a 14.4K
modem, the UI is more fun than anything else.  Once, not long ago, I honestly
believed that if I wanted to replace a word I had typed it was easier and
faster to type "^]2bWcWfoo^]A" than to click on the word and type "foo", and
therefore, it was a necessary evil to embed GNU readline into everything that
read from the terminal.