From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:38:56 +0200
From: Mechiel Lukkien <mechiel@xs4all.nl>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Message-ID: <20090718103856.GG8655@knaagkever.ueber.net>
References: <20090718074338.1A91D5B18@mail.bitblocks.com>
	<158688033fe375ed6e935e472986d876@quanstro.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] channels across machines
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On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 06:25:19AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> i think the general idea is that if you want to do this between
> arbitrary machines, you provide a 9p interface.  you can think
> of 9p as a channel with a predefined set of messages.  acme
> does this.  kernel devices do this.
>
> however inferno provides file2chan
> http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/2/sys-file2chan.html.
> of course, somebody has to provide the 9p interface, even
> if that's just posting a fd to /srv.
>
> if you wanted to do something like file2chan in plan 9 and c, you're
> going to have to marshal your data.  this means that chanconnect
> as specified is impossible.
[...]
>
> after whittling away problem cases, i think one is left with pipes,
> and it seems pretty clear how to connect things so that
> chan <-> pipe <-> chan.  one could generalize to multiple
> machines by using tools like cpu(1).

inferno's file2chan is local too, just giving a simple interface to
handling plain reads & writes on a file.  unless i've been using it
wrong.

what i like about file2chan is that you can return your own error
strings.  as far is i know, that's not possible with pipes.  if it is
possible, i'm very interested to learn how it's done.

mjl