Re: [9fans] GSOC: Drawterm for the iPhone

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Thu Mar 26 08:53:03 EDT 2009, uriel99@gmail.com wrote:
> Porting drawterm is a dead end with very little potential of either
> learning anything interesting or being useful in the future.

inferno is a red herring.  you might as well suggest qnx as
an alternative.

while drawterm might not be appropriate as is for the platform
in question, drawterm is still the best option for connecting
to a localish plan 9 system from a machine that's not running
plan 9.  it requires no local administration.  that's a big deal.
i already have two independent systems and 50 users to manage.

9vx could replace drawterm in our environment, but i think
the following work is required.  9vx needs
- to be able to boot with no local files other than the executable,
(i.e. directly from a plan 9 fs)
- to have native networking built in,
- to be harmonized with plan 9 devices.  (i don't think users will
accept "if you're on 9vx, do this; if you're on a cpu server, do that".)

(booting from a plan 9 fs could be an interesting gsoc project,
especially if the kernel were (sort-of) pxe loaded so that clients would
only need a local copy of the loader and changes would then be
automaticly distributed.)

so please stop saying that 9vx or inferno make drawterm obsolete
until that's actually true.

- erik