Re: [9fans] Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System - OSNews.com

["David Leimbach" <leimy2k@gmail.com>]

On 7/23/06, Andrew Hudson <ahudson.inc@gmail.com> wrote:
> I read with some interest the criticisms of my recent Plan 9 article
> on osnews. While I appreciate constuctive criticism and factual
> corrections (yes, it's Gforce not GeForce, yes there is an emacs) I
> think for the most part your criticisms are misguided.
>

Yeah, so you read my posts...

I just get REALLY tired, as I'm sure many people do, when you go to
read something reviewing an OS that you know about, just to see what
the reactions are going to be, and find it full of errors.

I apologize up front for my attitude towards it.  I was wrong, and I
was having a really messed up day to begin with.  Sometimes it's just
better to discard an email than send it.

That said, I'm glad you tried Plan 9, and I'm glad you attempted to
write something worthwhile about it on OSNews.

My behavior aside, it might be better in the future to pop a draft of
what you're intending to post to this group or maybe one or two people
from it who are experts (I'm not an expert btw) and ask them for their
feedback first.

A lot of what's wrong with the image of Plan 9 is that people "just
don't get it".


> With regard to David Leimbach's comments about the value of Osnews
> being overrated,

I think I mentioned all web journalism... I wasn't singling out OSNews per se.

 I have this to say. I pulled all of my materials from
> the available Plan 9 web sources. Which by the way are mostly dead
> links now. My impression when researching Plan 9 was that the
> documentation barely made it out of internal releases. There's
> certainly nothing polished about any of the Plan 9 repositories. There
> is a lot of contradictory information on some fairly important topics,
> like running under virtualization.  If you read through them there are
> a vast number of disclaimors. These sorts of issues really don't give
> one the impression that Plan 9 is undergoing a resurgence. If anything
> it looks like other projects have taken the family jewels and left the
> core project on life support.
>

Well you could have asked questions instead of assuming things.


> Many of the Plan 9 web links are dead. The links to LLNL are dead and
> it's my impression that LLNL is no longer involved in Plan 9 efforts.
> Mail to some of the more visible Plan 9 proponents at LLNL went
> un-answered or bounced.

Do you mean LANL?

>
> Links to VMWare support for Plan 9 are mostly dead and an archived
> post on 9Fans said V4 would never run on it. I couldn't get Plan 9 to
> install under the now free Microsoft Virtual PC. Considering that MS
> VPC is free, completely skirts most driver compatibility issues, and
> could greatly increase Plan 9 trials you would think someone might
> publish a FAQ for nubes. But there isn't one.
>

I thought our Wiki had a link to this stuff.

> Here's a real issue that I don't think was ever adequately addressed
> in any Plan 9 literature I ran across in my all-to-brief research. How
> do you convey the deep concepts of Plan 9 to someone who doesn't have
> 5+ years of large scale system admin experience, or a Master's degree
> in Computer Science? How do you convert the unwashed masses of Linux
> users who boot the LiveCD and don't find KDE, Gnome, an IM client, or
> Mozilla? The importance of an OS these days isn't about all the magic
> in the kernel, it's what the OS can do for the user.  And by the way
> you have 15 minutes to provide the new user with an exciting
> out-of-box experience before you have lost them. With so many OS
> alternatives out there already, people have a low threshhold for a
> LiveCD with few user privileges.
>

Now you've hit the nail on the head I think.  I don't have a Master's
in Computer Science but I think a lot of appreciating plan 9 comes
from understanding what's being abstracted at the interfaces it
provides.  Once you realize you can do things like tunneling
seamlessly by using "sshnet" (as easy to use as any ssh command is)
combined with the ease of u9fs, you can even find that the distributed
namespace will integrate fairly nicely with your existing unix
machines, and good times are had by all (hopefully).

> Please forgive me if this has already been discussed. For all I know
> it could have been a recurring thread since the Plan 9 inception. But
> the fact remains that you have an operating system that is dazzling in
> brilliance to a small number of really bright people, and no one else
> gets it.

Again the hammer falls on target.

>
> So please let me apologize for not completely conveying some of the
> important issues such as SecStore and ndb. I worked with the material
> at hand, had a limited time to write the article, and provided
> references when I could. It was a fun research project. If, however,
> other people see the reaction that 9Fans have to earnest contributors,
> don't expect a lot more of them.
>

Well, as I said, I think your heart was in the right place but without
doing real research and checking your facts, you're not really helping
our situation as much as spreading stuff that will live on in google's
caches about Plan 9 that aren't necessarily true.

Surely you have to see how that can possibly be damaging.

> Kind regards,
> Andrew Hudson
> Ahudson.inc@gmail.com
>