From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4700DCC7.5070108@gmx.de> Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 13:40:55 +0200 From: Kernel Panic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: X Window System References: <1190553102.693814.317030@y42g2000hsy.googlegroups.com> <1191144354.638906.73590@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: <1191144354.638906.73590@g4g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: c900d882-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 app wrote: >So, if not X, then how about some higher (or eperhaps lower?) layer >libraries (qtk? Qt? Gecko?) ported so that porting the 10 (or 100) >best known FOSS packages (whatever they are) would become more >possible? > > Go! look at these 100 best known programs... Look at the code and the dependencies... its not that easy/beauty. >How about a project to take something like Firefox and restructure the >whole sw so that best modules would be kept and other modules re- >implemented /dev/draw way and Rio way? > > That gets you the same big old programs lunix has... In the end, you dont port the programs to Plan9 but the other way arround... and then you are where anything started. >Or is the real problem really the GUI? Or something else, like the GNU >toolchain needed to compile a typical FOSS project? > > No, its not just the GUI. One of the strongest thinks of Plan9 are the simple and small libraries. The small code makes it possible for a small comunity to maintain it. Even a single person can read and understand most of the code. In contrast to the GNU userland. Here are thousands of programers out here to fix and hack on these zillion-lines-always-changing GNU code. Here are huge dependency graph for all that stuff. Its mutch work to port, fix, maintain... I doubt a single person/small comunity can do it... And what do you get if you are done? Firefox? Just a webbrowser for all that? Here is abaco... its very small, fast and has a nice UI. It has limitations but why not improve it then? Its small... you can actually understand and fix the code or ask the author. Its mutch more fun to make native Plan9 applications. If that gets you to implement some kind of UI(-library) that turns out to be usefull in other programs that will be great. IMHO... If you are serious with Plan9... eat Plan9 dogfood... start using it on daily basis... see what missing for YOU... start writing your programs yourself with the tools that Plan9 gives you. In many cases... this will result in programs that are mutch more simpler and smaller. If you do it you will note what Plan9 lacks and maybe provide a solution that further programers can profit of. cinap