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

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 09:29:14AM +0000, Richard Miller wrote:
> 
> Never mind, I think I can just about see the gist of what you're
> trying to get across.  It's meant to be insulting, right?
> 

It's meant to be a practical answer.  When people come looking for
information, they want to know where the information is.  "It's in six
different places, and the only consistent place to find them is by
asking over and over again on a mailing list, because they move every
couple years" is not an answer that people find much use for.

Generalizations are useful ways to get an overall picture of the
situation.  If you read the documents on 9p.io, none of the people who
currently develop Plan 9 or software for it are even mentioned except in
the contrib index.  

An example of this is how people always describe 9p.io as a mirror.  I'm
grateful it's up, but the first time I found out that people have been
posting source code to it post-mirror is *in this thread*.  How is
anyone supposed to have been able to discover this?  Repeatedly walking
the tree and diffing everything just in case?

Another good example is the kernel changes we only find out about when
someone tries to build a Go beta on 9front, fails, and then we realize
that someone on that team has modified the kernel for the language.  I
opened a ticket and asked for such things to be mentioned in the Go
release notes, and they kindly accomodated me.  But that was not the
default behavior; the default behavior was to assume everyone was
monitoring some mercurial repository on bitbucket.  Those assumptions do
not hold.

As for the "just send the money" joke, the code lives at
code.9front.org/hg/ and the (little-used, despite years of requests for
its existence) wiki is at code.9front.org/wiki/.  The code repos are
documented on 9front.org and the wiki is not advertised beyond the
people who asked for it, but it's open to everyone and contains a
changelog.  

I appreciate the work that people put into Plan 9.  The reality of that
work is that it's scattered, difficult to find, and necessitates years
of monitoring 9fans to identify the people who do it.  That works for
the people involved, and nobody at this point expects it to change, but
it is extremely disconnected from the way people tend to go about
developing software nowadays.  For all practical purposes, sl's answer
is accurate.  Whether it's insulting is really up to the reader.

khm