From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200312090454.hB94skl24638@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Installed Plan 9, now what? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 08 Dec 2003 20:02:56 PST." From: Dan Cross Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 23:54:45 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 9dfebed4-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.