Re: [9fans] Binary format

[blstuart@bellsouth.net]

>> We recompile the relevant executables. The speed of kencc makes this
>> much less painful than you might expect. It also happens very rarely
>> on plan9 - I cannot remember the last time we had a "big" pull.
>
> Okay, but then (as an admin) you have to know which apps have
> to be recompiled. For a small system this might be okay, but
> that doesnt scale well ;-o

Keep in mind that Plan 9 isn't a new OS just waiting for thousands
of GNU apps to be ported.  Plan 9 is over 20 years old and has
a community that's developed native apps and a few selected
ports for the things the community finds useful.  So the kind of
apps explosion that would require it to scale well is anathama to
the culture.  Certainly there are things that would be welcomed
to be be written, and a few even ported.  But having 72 different
X11 widget "toolboxes" and 42 different GUI versions of diff
will meet with a resounding thud.  Eye candy, complexity, and
mainstream popularity don't impress the people in the Plan 9
community; elegance and originality do.

But beyond that, the main distribution includes both binaries
and source for updates.  So a pull will generally get everything
you need without needing to recompile.  And if you do want to
recompile everything, running mk in /sys/src will recompile
everything and not take all that long doing it, especially if you
keep the object files around.

BLS