Re: [9fans] Installed Plan 9, now what?

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

What Scott said.  My concerns here stem from my days as a Lunix system
administrator, and the difficulty of keeping localized changes straight
in the face of vendor changes; RCS, though used, didn't do everything,
because vendors started making necessary changes that simply checking a
file out from RCS would overwrite.  All the diffing and patching became
tedious; multiplying that over hundreds of machines with different
functions in tens of different administrative domains quickly leads to
a lot of tedious work.  While Plan 9's architecture really attenuates
the problem, I'd like to try and eliminate it.

This isn't Unix; there's only one vendor.  As for division of
change-authority (for lack of a better term), it's really simple:
anything with the name local in it is off limits for any `vendors' (ie,
Bell Labs).  Everything else is `change at your own peril' for everyone
else.  Create /dist/replica/defaults, that tries to dot
/dist/replica/defaults.local.  Problem solved.

It could be argued that the proliferation of hacks Geoff mentions in
Lunix-land happened because no one ever had a decent convention that
allowed for a clear seperation of authority between vendors and sites.
We have an opportunity with Plan 9 to try and do it right, and we
should.  Rob's paper on the death of systems research lists system
administration as a problem area worthy of investigation; instead of
sticking our collective heads in the sand and pretending this is a
non-problem, let's tackle it head on and figure out a good way to
address it.  Is all the .local stuff perfect?  No, not really, and the
warnings are good, because they give us perspective.  But, what's a
better alternative?  I'm all eyes.

	- Dan C.