Re: [9fans] Is the vanilla Plan 9 still alive?

[Ori Bernstein <ori@eigenstate.org>]

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 08:24:41 -0600, Steven Stallion <sstallion@gmail.com> wrote:

Against my better judgement...

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 08:24:41 -0600, Steven Stallion <sstallion@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 3:30 AM Richard Miller <9fans@hamnavoe.com> wrote:
> > Grow up.
> 
> Indeed. It's interesting that folks from 9front like to tout their
> development as "open" using tools that others in the community have
> developed in addition to their own. To wit, you seem to have gotten
> along quite nicely using the porting work I did for Mercurial in 2012.

Yes, and thank you. I mean that.

You put your code in the open, and people that found it useful
were able to use it.

> The Plan 9 community is certainly fragmented, but there are still a
> number of people that are willing to share their knowledge and work
> with others and it benefits no one to cast aspersions.

It's frustrating. I *want* to see a healthy, active Labs
distribution.

From my viewpoint, fragmentation doesn't capture the nature of the
difficulty. The problem is that the fragments are invisible.

The most official looking site for vanilla plan9 is 9p.io.  It
doesn't show any sign of activity since 2015.  The wiki not only
fails to point to a more up to date location, it confuses the
issue by exclusively pointing at dead links.

9legacy exists. It doesn't bill itself as living continuation of
Plan 9.  It claims it's a patch set for the last image to come
out of the moldering corpse of Bell Labs. Even there, '9fs sources'
tries to connect to the long-gone sources.cs.bell-labs.com.

There's code scattered on contrib, but as for who has the most up
to date/maintained/functioinal version of something -- it's
hearsay, and usually, I haven't heard anyone say.

There's the plan9-contrib github repository, but the last commit
on that was over a year ago, and until recently, there was no way
to use it *from* plan 9 -- now, lufia has ported git, and I wrote
git9.  Lufia's patches seem to be stalled in review.

There are contrib directories, but projects are haphazardly thrown
in, often duplicated them, with no indication of what's working,
up to date, or maintained.

Code may exist, but...  where?  I've been around for a while and I
would have trouble finding the bits needed for a day-to-day usable
system outside of the 9front world.

God have mercy on someone trying to use the system seriously for the
first time.

-- 
    Ori Bernstein