On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 04:20:22PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>Nonsense.  You think rc has never changed before?  There have been
>plenty of non-backwards compatible changes in Plan 9.

You miss the point entirely. I agree that things shouldn't stay the same 
simply for the sake of compatibility. Plan 9 threw away a bunch of UNIX 
crud in the begining, and was not set in stone from the begining. I have 
no desire to add teletypes and ioctls to be compatible with UNIX.

The point is that rc(1) has been rc since the begining. It's rc 
everywhere. If you write an rc script, you can expect it work wherever 
you send it. The one infuriating exception which I've run across is the 
UNIX port, which I have to worry about being in peoples' PATHs on UNIX, 
rather than the Plan 9 version.

If there are to be changes, there's no reason to make those 
changes to rc. It would be best to create a new shell that deals with 
the shortcomings of rc, rather than adding features and cruft. That is 
how UNIX got to be so cruddy to begin with. The reason that sh(1) and 
Plan 9 are so nice is because they reevaluated and threw away most of 
what came before them.

>>It runs on Inferno, which runs on Plan 9. You can script for Plan 9 in
>>Inferno's sh. You can even script for UNIX in it. I've done both. It
>>works. It's not even ugly.

Then perhaps, as has been said for ages, it is best to make the 
integration between Inferno and Plan 9 more seemless, and the 
installation easier. It would, indeed, be nice to include Inferno in 
Plan 9 by default.

-- 
Kris Maglione

The one ingredient you made a special trip to the store
to get will be the one thing your guest is allergic to.