Re: [9fans] Do we have a catalog of 9P servers?

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

> I have no reason to believe Bell Labs' not-so-current
> experimentation is any more "saintly" and free of blemish than the
> previous. In time somebody will come up with the Plan 9 Haters Handbook.

Surely, there has been enough traffic here to emphasise that Plan 9
contains some good, fresh ideas in many cases to address Unix's
original failures of vision?

The "perfect" operating system isn't even a pipe dream, specially when
hardware converges to a lowest-common-denominator variety of CPU
design with legacy going back generations and the common consensus is
to inflate the kernel with as many features as it can possibly
contain, irrespective of their actual merit, nevermind their mutual
incompatibilities.

Plan 9 is not "saintly" and I fail to see how you could have arrived
at the perception that anyone here considers it so.  Our own
frustration (mine, at any rate) is that none of the more popular
alternatives to Plan 9 has geared itself up to discard, as Plan 9 has,
the baggage that makes Unix an inferior operating system and worse,
that by refusing to see the need to do so the Unix-perpetuating
community is condemning users to suffer unnecessarily.  In this
respect Plan 9 shows some of the way, it is annoying that it goes
largely unacknowledged, specially as this becomes an obstacle to any
further research in that direction.

Information Technology has always been very complex and consequently
prone to failures; sometimes spectacular failures, more often at the
level of mere inconveniences.  At the same time, computing power has
increased phenomenally, making it possible for information
technologists to aspire to grandiose products.  The nett effect is an
impossibly huge quantity of "software" of very dubious quality,
partially moderated by the audience that uses it, an audience that is
hardly competent to judge its quality and, worse, is conditioned to
accept mediocre products because it is not aware of any alternatives.
For that matter, there may be no alternatives, but that is a
self-perpetuating situation.

Ii is no more than a delusion that the audience will supply the
quality, a delusion originating from the sheer magnitude of the
audience.  The result: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and all the other
offerings in diminishing popularity.

Plan 9, initially, bucked this trend, aiming for simplicity and
accuracy rather than quantity.  Sadly, that's not a great survival
trait _in_the_current_context_.  Reminds me of the Great Reptiles.
They ruled the world until conditions demanded different properties
(furry skin?  small size?  warm blood?  viviparous?  whatever) and
then they perished.

My hope is that Plan 9 is more like a small furry mammal than
something destined for estinction.  But that is because I have
considerable investment, technical and emotional, in it, not because
it is a holy grail.  I approve of its "new" properties and, being
somewhat more discriminating than Mother Nature (or Natural
Selection), I believe they are improvements in an abstract, not just,
maybe not even, in a pragmatic, survival-oriented fashion.  Maybe I'm
looking at esthetics when the rest of the world is looking for
performance.  In my philosophy, civilisation is the ability to
transcend the practical and seek something more satisfying;
mathematics is more beneficial than physics, Plan 9 is more beautiful
than Linux.

But not saintly, not perfect, not the product of infallible wisdom.
Not even more useful, any more than, say, Michelangelo's David is
useful.  Plan 9 is the product of artistry, the best I have been
exposed to, which is not to say that there aren't sculptures out there
that may be deemed greater than Michelangelo's.

But, in a subjective fashion, Plan 9 is better than the obvious
contenders, where it is clear that the developers have followed
totally different "esthetic" principles and, sadly, have overlooked
certain fundamentals that are in my opinion totally non-negotiable
simply because they have been revealed and shown to be valuable.

You want something else, you're extremely lucky to exist in a world
with many choices.  Make the most of them.

++L