Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno

["Jack Johnson" <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On 3/6/07, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> I actually agree with your points in many ways. I just don't know how
> to get around the problem of showing this system to people.

I have to admit, I'm a waffler (yum, waffles, but way off topic).  I
have no Plan 9 system running currently, but I managed to wade through
the wiki and successfully get a server and netbooting terminals up at
one point, and I love the system.  But my day job requires certain
tools that I neither have the time nor the skillset to reimplement on
Plan 9, and though there are workarounds it does pose a barrier to
adoption.

Now me, I think obstacles were meant to overcome.

If I were charged with trying to deploy, enforce adoption, whatever,
I'd start with the low-hanging fruit.  Something like Plan 9's DNS and
DHCP integration is just genius, even for the monkeys who have only
ever seen it done the Windows way.  I'd probably introduce them to rc
outside the Plan 9 environment so they can compare it to bash or
whatever shell they've been using and see how much easier it is, then
bring them into Plan 9 proper so they can see how much more powerful a
shell script can be when supported by the right environment, and let
them explore the environment that way, as an extension of the shell.

My running joke when I try to explain my fascination with Plan 9 to
others is that I always had questions like, "How do you do X?" and
someone would respond, "Oh, we use awk for that."  Especially for the
people who don't enjoy the perspective of history, it really can be a
paradigm shift to not need to build a network infrastructure or create
and destroy a dozen objects to get at some trivial piece of data.

That paradigm shift does haunt us with rio, as people have a heavy
expectation of how a windowing environment should behave.  One way to
fix that is to change the windowing environment, but that may not be
the right way.  I've used the VNC trick in the past, but it would be
nice to be able to resize the VNC window with the expected window
behavior, using something like a kind of rootless VNC server, just
pushing the app windows.  I've seen single applications delivered by
Citrix, RDP and now NoMachine NX.  That kind of integration, where you
could open a browser as if it were a native app (especially if it were
coming from a self-hosted xen image) could lower that barrier to entry
and help meet those expectations.

> most of the Plan 9 guys are at google, running large Linux clusters
> ... and I believe many of them carry macos systems around now.

My question is, what did they take with them?  Can we use that to
leverage bringing people back across the bridge?

-Jack

P.S.
And now we all thank Russ again for plan9ports.